Lao—person of Laotian nationality.
Pathet Lao—Laotian Communist Party cum guerrilla army of mid-twentieth century, ally of Viet Cong in Vietnam War.
Lao Tze—putative author of Tao Te Ching, hence legendary founder of Taoism, possibly historical personage.
THE CIRCUS OF DR. LAO—twentieth-century fantasy novel by Charles Finney.
Posner shook his head in bewilderment; it seemed to Monique that he was making an effort to avoid the cliché of scratching it.
“Search word Lao,” he said. “Sequence and record. Chronological. Follow Lao. Voice only. Playback.”
“. . . Lao, Mao’s blood brother, da, Kutnik . . . ?”
“. . . Lao, Marenko . . . (laughter)”
“. . . Lao, da . . . ? He is Indian, or Californian mystic . . .”
“. . . Lao, is Chinese Minister of Environment? Haven’t met yet . . .”
“. . . Lao, Chu Lun, Ivan . . .”
“. . . Lao and Davinda, Davinda and Lao, is code maybe . . .”
“Maybe?” Avi Posner snarled sardonically. “Stop!” he fairly shouted.
He turned off the computer with an angry gesture, stood up looking quite worried, began pacing in small circles.
“What is it?” Monique asked. “What’s the matter?”
Posner stopped pacing. He stared at her. He seemed to be studying her. “Do you have a need to know?” he muttered in a tone of voice that seemed to indicate that he wasn’t really asking her, but himself.
“Know what?”
“Can I tell you . . . ?” he muttered. “Can I not . . . ?”
Avi Posner sighed. “Outside,” he said.
“You think this place is bugged?”
“Assume that every place is bugged, Monique. I believe I’ve told you that.”
“But the only people who could be bugging this apartment are your—”
“I’m bending the contract a bit. I’m doing this on my own authority. There’s no choice. You now have a need to know.”
“Know what?”
“Outside.”
Outside on the narrow balcony, it was hot and muggy and the graying of the sky by an alien atmospheric condition not quite coherent enough to be called cloudy but too high to be called fog not only contributed to a sense of psychic oppression but somehow did have Monique wondering uneasily about its possible connection to Condition Venus. Posner went to the iron railing, leaned over, motioned for Monique to do likewise.
“The reason you have a need to know, the reason I’m telling you this,” he said sotto voce, “is that you must keep John Sri Davinda away from the Marenkos.”
“May I ask why?”
“I suppose so, not that they tell me everything,” Posner muttered unhappily. “What I have had a need to know, according to the client, is that the climate model Davinda is demonstrating on Sunday is their whole raison d’être for the conference.”
“What! How is that possible?”
Avi Posner shrugged. “This they do not believe I have a need to know,” he said. “But this is why they are guarding whatever it is behind that canvas screening in the Grand Palais like an old-fashioned state secret.”
“Just another climate model . . . ? It makes no sense.”
“I am given to understand that the client financed whatever it is, and that the client believes that whatever it is will convince even the Siberians that Condition Venus is an inevitability unless they finance the client’s projects to stop it against their own class self-interest.”
“Our . . . client poured all that money it really can’t afford into a crap-shoot bet that Davinda’s climate model can do that?” Monique exclaimed.
Posner pressed a finger to her lips, leaned closer.
“He’s crazy?” Monique whispered. “Sounds to me like the client’s been taken in by a pretty clever con artist.”
“Maybe . . .” Posner whispered. “But maybe not . . .”
“But how?”
Posner fidgeted. He positively squirmed. “This they do not believe I have a need to know either. And maybe they are right. Maybe this is something I do not want to know . . .”
Monique took him by the shoulder, turned him toward her rather gently. The look on his face was not that of the tough professional Mossad operative. Avi Posner looked . . . haunted.
“This is only deduction, Monique, there is no corroboration, but, well . . .”
“Spit it out, Avi. . . .”
Posner sighed. “A climate model, no matter how advanced, no matter how sophisticated, is software,” he told her. “So what they are hiding under guard can only be the hardware it runs on. . . .”
“Obviously . . .”
No breath of wind disturbed the heavy muggy air. But Monique felt a chill anyway.
Avi Posner wrung his hands together. “Well, if it used a polymerized human brain as a central processing unit . . .” he muttered furtively.
“They couldn’t!” Monique exclaimed.
“Of course they could,” Posner whispered softly. “Polymerized rat brains are commonly used as parallel meatware processors in top-end equipment, and pig brains are winked at in a few Muslim and Jewish jurisdictions. From a technical point of view, a mammalian brain is a mammalian brain. And that chimp brain affair . . .”
A few years back, the Chinese had cloned a chimpanzee brain, polymerized it, and installed it as a central processing unit in a computer. But the worldwide shrieks of rage and horror when they boasted publicly about it without so much as a poll or a focus group first had made it politically and ethically impossible to go beyond the brains of rats, a universally unpopular mammal with no significant sentimental constituency.
“They wouldn’t!” Monique exclaimed. “Would they?” she added in a much less certain tone of voice.
“It would certainly be the most powerful computer ever constructed. . . .”
“But public relations suicide!”
“So it would seem,” Posner said. “At first glance. To an operative of Bread & Circuses. But . . .”
“But?”
“But from a more ruthlessly sophisticated realpolitik point of view, what you call the ‘deep sell’ might be the reverse. Precisely because it would break such a strong taboo, because it would seem to be such a public relations disaster, because it would seem to be so politically counterproductive, would it not be the ultimate proof of sincere desperation beyond mere economics? Would not even the Siberians be therefore convinced that even capitalist monsters would only do such a thing to save the planet itself?”
“I think I’m going to puke,” Monique said.
It wasn’t true, but she wished it were, she wished she could disgorge this morsel of tainted knowledge, for Posner’s theory had a dreadful and slimy credibility. Such a twisted deep sell strategy might very well work.
Worse still, much worse, if in fact the Big Blue Machine was in possession of self-convincing knowledge that Condition Venus was imminent, would not such a horrid act be morally justified?
Wouldn’t she herself do her professional duty and use such a deep sell if she knew that the alternative was the death of the biosphere?
Indeed, hadn’t she been unknowingly been involved in doing so all along? Would she back out now? Could she?
Should she?
“Lao is the code name for . . . for that, Avi?” she said.
“Lao . . . ?” Posner muttered distractedly. “Lao?”
Then, more forcefully, as if returning from a distant somewhere else: “I have no idea who or what Lao is.”
He frowned, he turned back toward the apartment, toward his business-as-usual persona. “But the Marenkos dropped this seemingly meaningless word into their general conversation no less than half a dozen times. So we had damn well better find out.”
Eric Esterhazy was not surprised that the dining room of the Marenkos’ rented town house was furnished like a cross between the Versailles palace and a five-star bordello in Monaco.
The
Marenkos had summoned Eric and invited Eduardo Ramirez—no one could summon Eduardo—and Eduardo had brought along Mom—no one could presume to refuse Eduardo a choice of dining companion either. Eduardo had arrived costumed as a twentieth-century banker in a severe black pin-striped suit. Mom wore a loosely flowing rose pantsuit and a matching derby hat with a veil that reached down just past her eyes. Eric was accoutered in a lime-green linen suit and black silk shirt.
This gear somehow went with the room that the retro-English butler escorted them into with much bowing and flourishing: a huge eighteenth-century formal salon, with massive crystal chandeliers, a high paneled ceiling painted sky-blue with clouds, floral and fruit sconce-work in full color, nineteenth-century landscape paintings in massive gilt frames, rose and blue flocked silk wallpaper, a huge antique dining table with white napery, and service of blue Delft china, Venetian crystal goblets, solid gold dinnerware.
It was a surprise therefore when the Marenkos entered in matching plain black jumpsuits, no jewelry, no gold braid, no decoration of any kind, like Brigade Ninja Ronin operatives prepared for a drop behind enemy lines.
It was an even bigger surprise that while the lavish lunch was served by five waiters in full black formal, one for each diner, nothing stronger than white wine was served with it and Stella and Ivan Marenko sipped abstemiously even at that.
Over an entree of raw oysters piled high with caviar, Ivan Marenko laid it all out succinctly. His English might not have become perfect, but the borscht and bullshit had pretty much gone with the drunk act and the tacky flash.
“We can assume that Sunday surprise will be this Davinda climate model. Logical to assume that secret under guard in Grand Palais has something to do with it. That Big Blue Machine believes it opens our wallets. So . . . we must make Davinda talk, get look at what is being hidden in Grand Palais, all before Sunday. And we know Monique Calhoun is monitoring our table talk, but she doesn’t know we know, could be advantage. Questions?”
Mom had one, but it was for Eric.
“You fucked her yet?” she inquired genteelly.
“Mom!”
“Spare us the gallant knight act, Eric, we all know you’re not, we’re all adults who’ve consented to acts that would make a pederastic pirate blush, and we have a need to know.”
“Your mother has a point,” Eduardo said.
“Yes, I have fucked her, Mom,” Eric said crossly. And then, unable to resist the supercilious addendum: “Or rather, I have allowed her to fuck me.”
“Noblesse oblige . . .” said Eduardo dryly.
“Dirty job, but someone gets to do it!” Ivan Marenko observed somewhat less suavely.
“I fail to see what this has to do with—”
“She in love with you, kiddo?”
“Get real, Mom!” Eric snapped back without thinking.
“In lust, at least, I hope?”
This both required and inspired more thoughtful consideration. Who had seduced whom? In a perverse manner, it had been Stella Marenko who had seduced Eric, by dropping him into the computer room with Monique in a state of frustrated tumescence in which he would’ve fucked almost anyone even minimally presentable who made herself available. In which state, he had indeed worked his wiles on Monique, according to both plan and erect inclination. And she had indeed responded.
But on the other hand, Monique had run that tasty Mata Hari tease on him, to which he had responded at least as enthusiastically, even though, or perhaps because, it was quite openly a stratagem.
From one point of view, it had all been quite humorous, from another, deliciously perverse, and be that as it may, when push, as it were, had finally come down to prolonged shove, he had quite enjoyed it, and was far too experienced to believe that either her enjoyment or her orgasm had been faked.
“Let’s just say the chemistry is there,” Eric concluded.
“This is your professional judgment, or your dick talking, Eric?”
“In certain instances, Mom, they are one and the same. But what is the point?”
“The point,” said Eduardo, “is point of entry, Eric. We need a point of entry into the strategy of the Big Blue Machine, the only available one would seem to be Monique Calhoun, and the only point of entry to her would seem to be—”
“—the point of your prick!”
Eduardo glared at Mom. Mom actually looked chastened; an effect that, in Eric’s experience, no one but Eduardo Ramirez had ever been capable of achieving.
“The point being,” Eduardo said, “that it would seem that Monique Calhoun regards you in a similar manner. Do you think you can—”
“—stay on top of her?”
This time Eduardo did nothing, and the Marenkos laughed.
“I think I can manage,” Eric said, though admittedly it hadn’t quite turned out that way the first time around.
Fortunately, this train of conversation was interrupted by the arrival of the homard en son nid de truffe, lobster in saffron cream sauce served over huge mounds of sautéed truffles—a delicacy whose cuisinary might commanded a certain period of respectfully silent gustatory appreciation, and when the table talk resumed, the subject mercifully shifted to John Sri Davinda.
“Except for the opening night, he’s never been on the guest lists Calhoun has given Eric,” Eduardo said.
“Proof she wants to keep him away from us, da Ivan?” said Stella Marenko.
“Reason to put him on your list, Prince Potemkin,” said Ivan.
“As I have already . . . recommended,” said Eduardo.
“Doesn’t look suspicious?” said Stella.
“Da. But only of what they already know but don’t know we know they know. That we are very interested in this John Sri Davinda.”
“So if Calhoun tries to complain, how she complains maybe tells us something?”
“Is that why you kept dropping this word ‘Lao’?” said Eric. “To try and get a reaction that would give us a hint of what it means?”
“Da,” said Stella. “Interesting to rattle bars of cage to see what monkeys do.”
“Unless what they do is throw shit in your face!”
“Ivan! This is lunch!”
She couldn’t have made such a ghastly mistake.
The thin man with the close-cropped hair in the grimy white blouson and loose pantaloons approaching the dock end of the gangway was no down-on-his-luck karate master or indigent sensei of Third Force arcana or mendicant Buddhist monk lacking even a begging bowl.
He was John Sri Davinda.
In a panic, Monique Calhoun scooted up toward the bow end of La Reine de la Seine’s promenade, out of sight of Davinda as he boarded, to double-check her guest list.
No, Davinda’s name wasn’t on it.
But he had gotten past the people checking the invitations in the embarkation pavilion. Meaning he had one. Meaning he could only have gotten it from Prince Eric Esterhazy.
But why?
Had Eric done it just to torment her?
But Eric couldn’t know about Avi Posner’s order that she keep Davinda away from the Marenkos.
Could he?
Order?
That thought was a wake-up call. She was taking orders from a Mossad operative in the service of an umbrella organization of revenant capitalists whom Posner himself believed ruthless enough to install a human brain in a computer to further an agenda that might be the saving of the biosphere or just their own threadbare economic asses.
In the service of which, more or less under the orders of whom, she had had sex with a man for strategic gain. True, it had not exactly been cold-blooded, true too she had enjoyed it, but it still made her a whore from a certain viewpoint, albeit an enthusiastic one.
It was a long way from New York. It was even a long way from that tacky Gardens of Allah deal in Libya. It was no longer just Bread & Circuses.
As one of those sourceless Third Force epigrams had it: “Wherever you go, there you are.”
There was anothe
r one that went: “The way out is the way through.”
Ambiguous persiflage as the Third Force versions might be, the B&C version reduced it to pragmatic operative terms: “Deal with it first, and figure it out later.”
The crew was lifting the gangway, the Marenkos were on board La Reine, and now so was John Sri Davinda, and her task, however problematic, however she had managed or rather been managed to find herself stuck with it, was to keep the one from the other.
There seemed to be only one chance.
In for a dime, in for a dollar, as they still said anachronistically in New York long after that currency had gone out of circulation.
Now that we’ve established what you are, it’s just a question of price.
That was one New York line that Monique doubted would ever lose currency.
As was his expected custom, Prince Eric Esterhazy was up in the wheelhouse as the lines were cast off and Captain Klein warped La Reine de la Seine away from the dock, but he was not taking his usual prideful pleasure in the departure spectacle.
Instead, he was peering down at the forward promenade, where Monique Calhoun was trotting purposefully up behind John Sri Davinda, who stood leaning against the forward railing staring out across the Seine at the lights of the Trocadéro or perhaps just into space.
“Eric . . . ? Eric!”
Eddie Warburton was shouting at him to utter the next pro forma command.
“Oh . . . right . . . ” Eric muttered. “Light her up, Eddie!”
“Rock and roll!”
Bah-bah-BAH! BAH-BAH!!
The familiar orchestral fanfare sounded. The halogen tubes lit up La Reine. The big holographic smokestacks sprang into virtual being spouting twin phantom plumes of black smoke and clouds of white steam. The riverboat’s lasers exploded virtual star shells and Roman candles and rockets across the Parisian sky. The great paddle wheels began to turn. “When the Saints Go Marching In” resounded over the Seine.
The Queen of the River was under way.
But the princely master thereof was peering down at Monique Calhoun talking to John Sri Davinda with all the lordly dignity of a jealous husband peeking through a keyhole.
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