Finity

by John Barnes

  A few weeks ago everyone had gotten bored with the old Roman Forum setting that we’d had for the better part of a year, so to give it a drastic change we had reset it as Casablanca—not the city, but the film. That movie was still nearly the expatriate’s Bible—it had everything—a real American of African descent, a free and tough American, defiance of the Germans. Using that movie also made our chat group, which was a tight one, less likely to have visitors, since the movie was banned everywhere except the free countries (and even there was really only permitted in unadvertised private showings—local German consuls tended to regard it as something other than a purely internal matter).

  Helen and I had gotten lucky—I was wearing the Paul Henreid body, and looked smashing in a white suit; she had gotten the Ingrid Bergman.

  We went over to join our friends at the table. All of them had gotten there before we had, and were wearing the red rose on a lapel, or as a brooch, that indicated that they were present in real time, and not just an artificial personality recording the events for later. “Hello, everyone,” I said. “We have some real news this evening.”

  The Colonel—I had just learned that afternoon that his real name was Roger Sykes—was wearing the body of Sidney Greenstreet tonight; sometimes he wore the Bogart body instead. He leaned way back in his chair and said, “Well, then, share it.”

  At his right, Kelly Willen, wearing a dignified older lady from one of the crowd scenes, nodded and smiled. Terri Teal, dressed as a demimonde to no one’s surprise, nodded at us. She flicked some ash from her extremely long and decadent-looking cigarette holder and said, “Do tell.”

  The effect was somewhat spoiled for me by my knowledge that Terri was actually a strictly brought up sixteen-year-old girl whose prosperous father owned an import-export firm in Cairo, in the Italian Empire. Probably she’d never been allowed out of the house without a small army of guards and chaperones. All of us were fond of her but we could hardly help hoping that the day would come soon when she’d stop picking the most decadent possible roles for herself. “Do, do tell,” she added, in the most affected accent she had available.

  I grinned broadly and said, “We’re getting married.”

  Roger flagged down Humphrey Bogart and ordered champagne all around. Bogart leaned over the table and said to Terri, “I don’t know that I care for an underage dame in my joint.”

  We glanced at his lapel, saw that he was just a program, and all said “Ignore” in unison. He walked two steps backward, came forward, said “Right away, sir,” and went to get the champagne.

  I turned back to my friends and began, “We’re having a little pre-honeymoon in—” My voice stopped dead. I couldn’t seem to say either the word “Saigon” or “the Royal Saigon Hotel.” Everyone froze—but no one seemed to notice the trailing sentence, for a moment later the conversation resumed. And by way of bragging I added that we had both been hired by Iphwin, which did impress everyone.

  It was a pretty nice party, with champagne that could make you happy and silly but not drunk, or rather not drunk in a way that lasted after you took the headset off, and everyone talking about their day—Terri’s life and times at the American School, Roger’s beach fishing, Kelly’s getting a role in Abe Lincoln in Illinois at the American Theater in Paris. I wanted to say that I was amazed that the French Reich would tolerate that, but the conversation moved on while I was still formulating the thought. As it wound down—Terri was going off to school, Kelly needed to bathe and dress for rehearsal, and Roger was going to bed, one of the complications in a friendship that spanned so many time zones—Helen and I made our excuses, unplugged, and went downstairs.

  In appearance the Curious Monkey was extraordinarily simple—a large group of tables in what looked like an open-air setting—an air curtain kept it pleasantly air-conditioned. The rooms were simple and functional, with plain-looking tables and chairs, but if you knew what to look for you would know that every stick of furniture in the place was collectable early twentieth century. The walls held a dozen paintings of note—French impressionists mainly, but also a Mondrian, and—if you looked closely enough at the nondescript pen-and-brush of a cathedral, hanging in a dim corner near the bus counter—even an authentic Hitler. People were dressed exceptionally well, even the very famous.

  There was no menu per se; the waiter would talk with you for a while, get an idea of what you enjoyed and what you were in the mood for that night, and then go back and talk to the chef, who would endeavor to surprise you with something you would never have thought of, which you would like better than what you would have ordered.

  This particular waiter was a small, slim, gentlemanly man, Vaguely Eurasian in appearance, who listened to us with such great enthusiasm that anyone would have thought he really cared what we liked to eat. We chatted with him pleasantly for a few minutes, about Saigon and how we liked the place, before he said, “We had a message earlier that you are to be the guests of Mr. Iphwin. Mr. Iphwin told us to stress to you that you can have anything you would like, but he would be especially pleased if you would let us prepare Mr. Iphwin’s favorite meal for you.”

  Of course we agreed at once; curiosity alone would have insured that. It turned out to be sort of a sampler of old American cooking—a platter of foods that you might have found at an American picnic in the 1920s or 1930s. There were deviled eggs, a hot dog, a hamburger, a slice of meat loaf, a Southern-fried chicken breast, mayo and mustard potato salads, coleslaw, Jell-O salad, and baked beans, arranged artfully on a wicker tray with a red checked cloth. The ketchup was real Heinz Old Recipe and the mustard was Plochman’s Yellow—both of which were extremely expensive, made only in small hand lots by those families.

  Helen and I had each had some version of most of those dishes, but many of the authentic ingredients were now expensive and hard to come by. My guess was that we were eating a week’s college teaching pay. They served it with Miller, of course, the only authentic expat beer, tooth-chilling cold in a frozen mug.

  Dessert was a black cow, real right down to the Dad’s Root Beer. “Do you suppose,” I asked, “that they’re ever going to completely assimilate us? I mean, here we are, third generation out of the country, and you and I—we, who not only have never set foot in America, but only knew, when we were children, very old people who had left it when they were very young—we are getting misty-eyed over how this food is just the way it should be, and of course we’re insisting on marrying expats, both of us.”

  “I’ve heard the idea that what we’ve done is become the replacements for the Jews,” Helen said, scooping out a little of the homemade ice cream from her parfait glass. “You know, unassimilable people, profitable to have around, tending not to be liked by the neighbors. Can you believe they got the recipe to make this root beer, too? Anyway, we’ve become the people that can’t assimilate whether they want to or not, with no home of our own, loyal enough to whoever takes us in, hardworking, making some friends, but never exactly accepted as one of the locals. And about that... well, I’d say they seem to be right.”

  I shuddered. “Remember what happened to the Jews. And I suppose Americans aren’t that scarce—we tend to forget all the Reich Americans who are still living there. Their descent is as American as ours.”

  “Not really,” Helen pointed out. “We’re descended from all of America, the whole forty-eight, in the 1940s. The Reich Americans are descended from white people who could prove they didn’t have any Jewish, Negro, or Slavic ancestors. So much of real American culture was Negro, and Jewish, and big-city Slavic, and all the rest of the melting pot; the Reich Americans have thrown that all away, whereas we’re all interbred. We’re the real Americans. They’re one narrow slice.”

  She left it unsaid, since we were outside Enzy, but I knew perfectly well she was referring to my black grandmother and her Jewish grandfather. Once we became expats, many old barriers had come down, and already in the Reichs there was a stereotype of the expat American as a racial mongrel,
darker skinned than the Reich Americans.

  Helen went on. “Think about the fact that no expat I’ve ever known has been in touch with relatives in the Reich, even though just about all of us must have some. And we’re only the third generation. On my block there’s a man who is seven generations removed from Ireland, and yet he still stays in touch with his cousins. The family that runs that good Italian restaurant downtown—the one by the park?—is five generations out of Italy and still holds a party every time a cousin back home sends them a birth announcement. It’s only expat Americans who don’t seem to keep touch with America.”

  “Well, supposedly we were always very mobile, always moving over the next hill. Maybe we just find it easier to lose touch.”

  “I suppose anything is possible,” Helen said, “but it’s not like the Irish or the Italians all stayed home.” I was getting bored. This was one of those things expats could talk about endlessly. I wondered if, back when the Americans were still in America, they had spent as much time as expats did now talking about what exactly it meant to be an American. It seemed very unlikely.

  “Isn’t this whole meal amazing?” I asked, switching the subject. “I think I’ve had most of these dishes at one time or another, but not all at once, and when I have had this stuff it has rarely been with all authentic ingredients. And the fact that they could serve this all at once implies that they must have had all these ingredients just sitting back there in the kitchen waiting. Imagine being able to just do that.”

  She grinned at me. “Well, speaking of being able to just do things, our salaries are going way up. We can probably do this for anniversaries or something.”

  “It’s a deal,” I said, recognizing the request for what it was. “Of course after a while there may be problems getting a sitter—”

  Helen snorted with laughter. “Geoffrey Iphwin is offering us a chance to work on an extremely challenging and interesting project. I don’t plan on getting knocked up right away, my dearest, so if you’re hoping to get the project all to yourself that way, well, hope for something else. I’m not going to spend what could easily be the most exciting months of my intellectual life waddling around and throwing up.”

  “We can wait as long as you want to,” I said.

  There was a stir up front. It sounded like the typical situation—a German tourist from some backwater planned-development town in the New East, who has decided he wants to get a bite to eat, and hasn’t the foggiest idea that he is trying to barge into one of the most exclusive restaurants on the planet. The maitre d’ was shouting, “Sir, sir!”

  The fat man, galumphing along in his sandals, knee socks, baggy red shorts, and sweat-stained formerly white safari shirt, was headed up the aisle right toward us. Behind him, I saw a German officer, in one of those black uniforms with all the metal decorations around the shoulder, standing up and giving a firm order, the sort that most Germans, in the army or not, obey instantly.

  To my surprise, the German tourist ignored him. He kept coming. He looked around, then right at me, smiled in a way that froze my blood, and pulled a small pistol from the bulging lower left pocket of the safari shirt. I stared at it; owing to the policies the Reichs enforce on their trading partners, most of the world is disarmed these days and I’m not sure I had even seen a pistol since leaving the Navy.

  He brought the pistol up.

  He was still staring right at me. He pulled the trigger and I felt the pressure wave from the bullet as it passed my right ear.

  Something made me roll toward that ear and dive under the table. Everyone was screaming. I had made the right choice, because when he adjusted his aim to my left, he missed by a wider margin. From under the table I saw a bullet hole appear in the Mondrian, and some stupid distracted part of my brain realized that, whatever might happen next, I would now be forever part of one of the legends of the Curious Monkey.

  I expected the tablecloth to flip up and my last sight in this life to be the German and his pistol a scant yard away. I hugged the floor and shut my eyes.

  I heard three deep booms, one after the other, and a scream. Still not thinking very clearly, I poked my head out from under the white tablecloth just in time to see Helen take her fourth shot. I learned later that she had shattered his gun shoulder with her first shot, broken his leg with the second, and put one into his back when he fell forward. Now she calmly walked forward, stood over him, pointed that huge pistol at the back of his head, and, in the horrified silence that filled the Curious Monkey, she watched him for a long second until she saw him twitch; she fired a shot that put brains and blood all over the floor and seemed to make the walls of the Curious Monkey ring.

  She scanned the room, standing braced in letter-perfect position, much better than I had ever learned to do it in the Navy, with a two-handed grip on the big chunk of blue-black iron; whatever caliber it was, it was a hell of a lot more than my would-be murderer had had.

  Her face had a nearly blank expression of relentless attention, the like of which I had seen on the face of a racing pilot about to execute a tight turn around a pylon. Her jaw was set but not clenched, eyes narrowed slightly, mouth a flat line; you could have projected a laser beam backward through the barrel of that gun and it would have just touched the bridge of her nose parallel with her pupils. Her arms were tense, and the sleeveless long gown showed that she had a lot more muscle than I remembered; I saw her breathe, hold, decide there were no more targets, and only then decide not to fire again. She set the safety on the pistol and set it gently on the table, then calmly reached into her purse, pulled out her phone, and called the police. “This is international police badge oh four alpha india four seven eight bravo one zero. I’m at the Curious Monkey and I’ve got Interpol codes nineteen, forty-three, and sixty-eight here. Situation is under control, but you need to get a four one four, a seventy-eight, and a Foxtrot Mike Whiskey over here, right now.”

  I had no idea where she had learned to shoot, or when. Enzy is relatively backward about women’s issues and still doesn’t allow women in combat, and handguns were illegal outside of the military—she couldn’t even have learned in a private club. I lurched up beside the table, slightly messed by the spill of some expensive root beer onto one trouser leg, which I hoped would provide some camouflage for the wet spot I had made on the front of my pants. I was scared more than I’d ever been in my life, but otherwise all right. And how had Helen come to know international police codes as well as a cop? How did a professor of history carry an Interpol badge?

  The horrified maitre d’hôtel was just rushing up to our table, but Helen said to him, “I am terribly sorry about this and I deeply regret disturbing everyone’s dinner. We had just finished ours and we’ll go as soon as the police get our statements and decide whether or not to arrest me.” She went back to talking to the police on the phone; apparently they were so unused to being called to the Curious Monkey that they didn’t immediately know where it was.

  I looked from Helen to the maitre d’hôtel, and something caught the corner of my eye, causing me to glance back. The German tourist was lying there, face down, a great gaping hole in his lower back, his right arm at an unnatural angle where his shoulder had been shattered, blood pouring out of one pant leg, head smashed like a gourd hit with a bat. I smelled blood and some other unidentified stench—perhaps feces?—under the burnt odor of the thin cloud of blue smoke that still hung in the air, and I was sick to my stomach. I turned away, not wanting to see the sight, and drew great gasps of air, trying to hang on to the most expensive dinner I had ever eaten, tears of stress and terror leaking out of my eyes.

  Helen went right on talking on the phone, brushing escaping strands of hair out of her face with her free hand, as calmly as if she were working out a schedule conflict between her classes or placing a complicated catalog order. “If you can get a coroner to run a full spectrum of drug samples from the blood on the victim, right now while everything is fresh and runny, I know my employers will really appre
ciate it—yeah, exactly. Look, I know you have to arrest me and take me downtown. I know it’s nothing personal. Just make sure you get some authority on the line pretty fast and that they call Iphwin and Diego Garcia for confirmation, because while I’m sure you’ve got one of the nicer jails I’m ever going to stay in, my fiancé is springing for a hell of a good room at the Royal Saigon, and that’s where I’d rather spend my engagement celebration. Yeah, he’s with me, and a witness, so I guess you’ll have to take us both along—sure thing...” She sagged and seemed to be suddenly confused. “Who is this? What? I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She hung up and dropped the phone into her purse, then looked at the body, looked at me in an expression of bewildered terror, and said, “What are you doing alive? There’s not a scratch on you.”

  I didn’t know what she was asking—my first thought was that she had meant to shoot at me, that she had been part of the assassination plot, and was disconcerted to find she had shot her partner. Before I could frame any kind of a question, or any idea of any kind that might take me in the direction of making sense of all of this, a squad of uniformed Cochin-Chinese National Police rushed through the air curtain, grabbed the gun from the table, handcuffed Helen, and dragged me to my feet.