Greenhouse Summer

by Norman Spinrad

  “Can I get you a drink, Eduardo?” he said, moving toward the bar. He fantasized offering sherry or brandy, but that would be going way over the top. Besides which, he lacked the traditional cigars to go with it.

  “Tequila in the Mexican style if you can manage that,” Eduardo said, as if changing the mode to match his white linen suit, so reminiscent of Mom’s cherished Floridian retro gangster chic.

  Eric poured him his tequila, put it on a plate with a lemon slice and a saltcellar, took a snifter of old Calvados himself, put the drinks down on the little round coffee table between two big leather armchairs, sat down across from Eduardo, and waited for him to react to what he had seen.

  And waited.

  “Well, Eduardo . . . ?” he finally said.

  “Well, Eric, I certainly agree that these recordings are valuable material,” Eduardo Ramirez said. “The operative question is, to whom?”

  “To whom?” said Eric. “To us, who else? To Bad Boys.”

  “Then what do you recommend we do with them?”

  “Sell them, what else?”

  “To be sure, but to whom?” Eduardo wagged a cautionary finger. “Think carefully before you advise the obvious. Consider the larger ramifications. Yes, there are news organizations and scandal sites who would pay well for this, but by their modest standards, not by ours. Not nearly enough to cover what we would lose by selling it to them.”

  “Lose?” said Eric. “What would we lose?”

  “Give your brain some isometric exercise, Eric,” Eduardo said, softening it with an urbane little smile. “As your mother might somewhat less gently say.”

  Eric thought.

  The first thing that he thought, and sourly, was that going directly to Eduardo with this coup had not kept Mom, even in her physical absence, entirely out of the loop.

  Eric had never really felt uncomfortable dealing with his mother’s lover as his superior in the syndic, or at least so he told himself, and he knew that if it hadn’t been for Mom’s connections with Eduardo and unnamed others like him, he wouldn’t be where he was today.

  But he was where he was today.

  While it might have been Mom who had made him a Bad Boy, he was also a big boy now. He had made his bones. He was master of La Reine de la Seine, if perhaps in name only. And now he believed he had contributed something major to the fortunes of the syndic. The making of another set of bones, and perhaps a more important one. One that would establish him as more than a front man. More than his mother’s son. As a real player.

  And it would seem that Eduardo was challenging him to think like one.

  Well then . . .

  “If these recordings were broadcast, everyone would know they were made on La Reine de la Seine . . .” Eric said slowly. “Meaning that everyone would know that the boat was wired. Meaning we’d lose the whole operation. . . .”

  Eduardo merely nodded, smiled, salted the back of his hand.

  “So the recordings are worthless to us . . . ?”

  Eduardo shook his head, licked his hand, knocked back the tequila, bit into the lemon slice.

  “Selling to any syndic that would make them public would be a loser then . . . ?”

  “You are beginning to comprehend, Eric. . . .”

  “But threatening to sell them to the media . . .”

  Eduardo put on an exaggerated show of moral outrage. “Why Eric, that would be . . . blackmail . . . ” he said. “You’re a . . . Bad Boy.”

  Eric grinned. Then frowned.

  “But it would be a bluff,” he said. “And Big Blue would have to know it . . . so . . . so . . . ?”

  Eric realized, in no little confusion and consternation, that he appeared to have taken this train of logic to its inevitable unfortunate conclusion. “So we can’t do that either . . . ?” he said unhappily.

  “Not necessarily,” said Eduardo. “Consider what Bad Boys loses if we bluff and Big Blue calls. To preserve our honor and credibility, we are constrained to sell the recordings to the media at the cost of losing La Reine as a data sponge. A net loss, true, but less than catastrophic . . . to us.”

  He smiled, and this time Eric could see the gleam of the predatory teeth behind it.

  “Now consider what Big Blue loses if that happens. The conference they desperately financed to revive their sagging fortunes turns into a fiasco. Having faked the white tornadoes and been exposed, they can never credibly cry wolf again, even with a real one at the door. The True Blue cause itself is discredited and the Hot and Cold war is decided in favor of the Greens. If you were playing their hand, would you dare to call?”

  “No way,” said Eric.

  “And how much would you say they’d pay to prevent such a terminal outcome?”

  Now it was Eric’s turn to make with the feral grin, one top predator to another. “Just about anything short of everything they have.”

  “You’re learning, Eric,” Eduardo Ramirez said, and Eric felt a boyish glow of pride.

  “So we go ahead and do it!” he said. “Send them a copy of the recordings!”

  Eduardo Ramirez sighed. “Your mother’s son,” he said. “A woman of many virtues. But patience is not among them, as you may have noticed from time to time.”

  The flush that Eric now felt was far from pleasant.

  “Being young is nothing to be ashamed of, Eric,” Eduardo said gently. “We all must endure it, after all.”

  This did not exactly tranquilify Eric’s mood.

  “I don’t see what patience has to do with any of this,” he said irritably.

  “So I’ve noticed,” Eduardo said. “But consider. Is the value of these recordings likely to deteriorate with time? Might not their value increase if we didn’t use them to thwart Big Blue’s schemes and they somehow succeeded in using the UNACOCS to gain major new financing? The more money they have, the more money they have to lose, the more money they would be willing and able to pay to avoid losing it.”

  “Oh,” said Eric.

  Eduardo Ramirez nodded and favored him with a smile. “Some assets appreciate with time,” he said. “And all assets appreciate with knowledge.”

  “Knowledge . . . ? Of what?”

  “In this case, of what is really behind the moves the Big Blue Machine has been making. They spend money they cannot really afford to move UNACOCS to Paris and hire Bread & Circuses to promote it. They perhaps enlist Dr. Larabee and the Papal Legate in their scheme. They simulate the white tornadoes. But why?”

  “Why? To create a panic and trick Green money into financing their Blue operations.”

  “So it would seem. But why then do they have this Monique Calhoun hire La Reine de la Seine as a data sponge targeting the conference participants—”

  “—knowing that we’re running it!” Eric exclaimed. “They’ve been fools to take the risk, and these recordings prove it!”

  “Never assume that your adversaries are fools, Eric,” Eduardo told him. “They may be fools, but making the assumption is never an advantage. So assuming they’re not fools . . .”

  “There’s something they have a major need to know. . . .”

  “Very good, Eric. And therefore . . . ?”

  “The white tornado disneys aren’t their capper. They’ve got something else up their sleeve. But whatever it is, it’s not something they believe they have under control, at least not yet . . .”

  “Excellent, Eric. And we must . . . ?”

  “Find out what it is before we make our next move.”

  Eduardo Ramirez nodded. “And how do we do that?” he asked.

  But this time Eric felt that the question wasn’t rhetorical, that Eduardo was no longer playing sensei, that he was finally asking a question to which he did not have the answer, man-to-man.

  “Through Monique Calhoun,” he told Eduardo. “After all, they have put her on La Reine to find out something, and if we can find out what—”

  “Then we know what it is. But how—”

  Eric found hi
mself speaking as fast as he thought, or perhaps even a bit faster, and if Mom would say he was thinking with his dick, then so be it.

  “I let her seduce me. . . .”

  “I am truly touched by the sacrifices you are willing to make for the syndic, Eric.”

  “I don’t make it easy, but under enormous sexual pressure, I finally admit that I lied, that all the data feeds on the boat are recorded—”

  “We cannot compromise Ignatz,” Eduardo said firmly.

  “We don’t. All I allow her to get out of me is the existence of the raw recordings, thousands of hours of them. So which ones she takes will probably tell us something itself. And just maybe, she seduces me into helping her with the tedious task of rooting through it all. Which allows me to monitor what she’s searching for.”

  “Another disney,” Eduardo said. “Nice. It even gives us a credible way to leak the existence of the white tornado recordings to her handlers if and when the time comes. . . .”

  Eric nodding knowingly, as if he had thought of that angle too, which he hadn’t.

  Eduardo Ramirez smiled.

  Eric smiled back.

  There was a long moment of satisfied silence.

  “Another tequila, Eduardo?” Eric finally said.

  “I do believe I will,” Eduardo said. “But let’s go outside.”

  It was quite warm for the season, and the air was unpleasantly and uncharacteristically muggy, but the view from the terrace garden was still lovely at this hour, made even more dramatic by a rather unusual weather condition.

  The sky over Paris was a clear royal blue not quite yet deepening to purple at the zenith, but on the western horizon, a pearly fog bank seemed to be moving in like an enormous slow-motion breaker of cloud, turning the sun in the process of descending into it into a glowing disc of fiery orange that cast long mauve-tinted shadows over the streets of the city below, glazed the waters of the Seine with a golden sheen. The deeply shadowed vegetation encrusting the quais now seemed reminiscent of the lost reefs of tropic coral or a verdantly green human brain.

  Eduardo Ramirez sipped thoughtfully at his tequila as he gazed out over this tropical urban vista.

  “Paris is a fortunate city,” he said softly. “It was always a beautiful city, but before the warming, the climate was foul. The skies were gray and the weather was cool and dank for more of the year than not. Doubly fortunate to be situated in these rich climes.”

  “Doubly fortunate?”

  “Doubly fortunate that northwestern Europe can afford to pay the price to maintain the Gulf Stream with orbital mirrors. Without which . . . who knows, or wants to find out?”

  Eric had never observed Eduardo in such a mood before. But then, he had seldom had a real conversation with him in the absence of Mom.

  “Yes, a fortunate city, Eric. Almost as fortunate as Siberia the Golden. . . .”

  He turned to face Eric, and Eric saw that he was frowning now.

  “To maintain this balmy climate, the Gulf Stream must be maintained, and to do that, tropic waters must be heated thousands of miles away, which only adds more heat to the planet, and who knows, perhaps causes the north polar ice cap to melt faster than it otherwise might . . .”

  “I didn’t know you were an amateur climatologist, Eduardo.”

  Eduardo Ramirez laughed softly, ruefully so it seemed. “I may not know much about climatology,” he said, “but I know what I like. And I know we would lose these long sweet Parisian summer seasons should Big Blue succeed in its schemes to cool the planet back down. As Siberia the Golden would once more be locked in snow and ice.”

  “But they won’t,” Eric said him. “We have what it takes to stop them whenever we want to.”

  “But should we?” said Eduardo.

  “Should we?”

  “The Big Blue Machine may be a collection of revenant capitalist corporations out to turn a profit above all else, they may have faked the white tornadoes, but . . .”

  “But . . . ?”

  Eduardo shrugged. “But none of that necessarily prevents them from being right,” he said. “Perhaps Condition Venus is imminent. Perhaps the biosphere is in mortal danger. In which case . . .”

  He sighed. “In which case, we would not do right by stopping them, now would we? In which case, must we not sacrifice the lovely climate of this beautiful city, Siberia the Golden, and all the rest?”

  “Must we?” said Eric. Eduardo was unexpectedly floating out into waters a bit too deep for him.

  “If that should really be what it takes to preserve the biosphere itself, what choice would there be?”

  This was an Eduardo Ramirez that Eric had never known, and he was beginning to show Eric levels within himself that he had never known either, starting with the revelation that Eduardo owed his elevated position in the syndic to an elusive something more than cunning.

  “Your mother so enjoys Bad Boys’ gangster mystique,” Eduardo said, “and it’s certainly true that we evolved from mafias and triads. By certain definitions in certain jurisdictions we may even still be a ‘criminal organization.’ But we are not capitalists, never forget that, Eric. Do you know what really destroyed the capitalist global order?”

  Eric shook his head, never having given such matters any thought.

  “The economic historians speak of the bursting of the Great Bubble, the Markowitzians speak of the entropy created by the disjunction between the virtual and the productive economies, the Third Force mystics claim it was the despiritualization of capitalist man, and no doubt all that is true,” Eduardo told him. “But in the end, the capitalist world global order was destroyed by the very thing it worshipped. . . .”

  “The so-called sacred bottom line . . . ?” Eric ventured, and was rewarded with a nod and a rueful smile.

  “If capitalists had to choose between their own short-term economic self-interest and the survival of a larger common good, even one that included themselves, they would take the money and run. Even if there was no place to run to. It was said they would sell you the rope to hang themselves if they could do it at a profit.”

  Eduardo laughed. “And that’s essentially what they did.”

  “I don’t understand,” Eric said with utter sincerity.

  “Someone also once said that you have to be honest to live outside the law.”

  Eduardo turned to look out once more over balmy beautiful Paris and Eric too turned to stand beside him, surveying from on high the City of Light of which he was at least an ersatz prince.

  “Just what are you trying to tell me?”

  Eduardo did a fair imitation of Mom.

  “We’re Bad Boys, but we wouldn’t flush the world down the toilet just to make a fast buck in the process, kiddo! That’s the difference between predatory capitalist pigs and the bastard sons and daughters of romantic buccaneers and honest gangsters like ourselves!”

  Prince Eric Esterhazy struggled to fully understand what Eduardo Ramirez was trying to tell him, but it remained elusive.

  But somehow, as the heady floral fragrances of the city drifted up to mingle with the winey perfumes of the potted plants closer to hand, his rooftop garden seemed to transform itself into a disney of the tropical city below.

  As Paris itself too, in that moment, seemed to him a disney.

  But of what, he could not tell.

  WHAT IS THE LEVEL BEYOND VIP?

  Stella and Ivan Marenko.

  The only thing missing is the “Ode to Joy” over the speakers and a twenty-one-gun salute, and I’m liable to catch shit for not providing them, Monique Calhoun thought as she stood outside the Hotel Ritz watching the clattering Force Flic helicopter descend to the Place Vendôme perilously close to the central column in a fearful whirlwind of dust and debris and noise against all conventional rules and rational safety reason.

  “Do you know who these people are?” Avi Posner had asked when he called to inform her that the Marenkos were already on their way by private jet from Zekograd.

>   “The names are familiar . . .” Monique had said slowly, pretending to be searching her protoplasmic memory while running a quick netsearch on the fly. “The honcha and honcho of Meat & Potatoes, aren’t they?”

  She didn’t need to be told that the co-chairs of the largest Siberian agricultural syndic were just the sort of bears that the client had laid on the UNACOCS honey pot to attract, but Posner did it anyway.

  “That makes them important enough. But they are a lot more than that. They are . . . shamans, as the Siberians have it.”

  “Shamans . . . ? Witch doctors?”

  “Siberian hyperbole, of which they are major exporters. Powers. Influences. Weighty personages.”

  Posner’s image on the vidphone screen shrugged.

  “I am not a doctor of political philosophy from the Sorbonne, so please do not expect me to explain the politics of the Siberians, who claim not to have any,” he said. “Suffice it to say that Stella and Ivan Marenko have influence beyond their official positions of the sort that can open or close the Siberian purse strings. They are now your number-one priority. I want daily reports from you on everything they do and say, everything they think, if you can manage it. And they are to be afforded every courtesy, no matter how expensive, no matter how extravagant, no matter how bizarre. Without limit.”

  “Without limit?”

  “They are to be treated as the Second Coming of Santa Claus. What they request, you will obtain for them. If God Himself is occupying the suite they require, you will eject Him forthwith.”

  The extent to which this was or was not hyperbole was demonstrated less than half an hour later when some Force Flic functionaire called to tell Monique not to bother to send any limo to the airport.

  Somehow, while still in flight from Zekograd, the Marenkos had rented or commandeered one of their helicopters and had done the considerable whatever it took to circumvent any number of rules and regulations to have it take them directly from their plane and deposit them conveniently in front of the hotel.

  The Force Flic pilot managed to put the helicopter down without damage to life, limb, or property, and a couple debarked before the engine had completely powered down. No helicopter actually required the ducking of heads to pass under its still-turning vanes, but Monique had never seen anyone resist the reflex to do so.