This Other Eden

by Ben Elton

  ‘They won’t keep him long.’ Rosalie was sure of that. ‘The last thing the Garda want is the papers telling the world that a famous American Virtual Reality star tricked them into believing that he was a wanted Irish girl. There’s enough jokes about the Irish as it is.’

  She had just finished pulling on a change of clothes when they heard the roar of trucks hurtling back up the dirt track. There was no time to voice the disappointment they all felt. Rosalie moved as if she had to escape from armed police every day. She grabbed her automatic rifle and, pecking her granny and her granddad on the cheek, she ran out of the cottage and made for the outhouse where the trail bike was hidden. She was just kicking the machine into life as the Garda arrived. In the cottage, Ruth and Sean made ready to fire at the police vehicles. Nathan returned to his position under the table. There was the high-pitched rev of an over-tuned engine and Rosalie roared out of the shed and headed for the gully of the little stream by the dry-stone wall.

  It was over in moments, the Garda did not even leave their armoured trucks. A single stun-shell from the riot cannon mounted on the front of the lead vehicle blew the bike out from under Rosalie and she landed heavily in the stream. Nothing was broken and she was on her feet in an instant. Peering out of the gully, she considered running, but what was the point? They’d got her and she knew it.

  ‘Granny! Grandpa! Don’t shoot,’ she called as she emerged from the stream, her hands held above her head. ‘No sense us all going to prison.’

  Poor Ruth and Sean had to watch helplessly through the broken window as their granddaughter was nicked. Nathan tried to look elsewhere, furiously studying a magazine he found on a shelf. It is never a socially relaxing situation, being a guest in the house of people you do not know, as they watch a beloved relative get charged with numerous acts of terrorism and start what will almost certainly be decades in captivity.

  ‘Don’t you bastards understand!’ they could hear Rosalie shout as she was handcuffed. ‘The Earth’s being fucked rigid. We’ve got to do something.’

  ‘I have to tell you, Miss,’ the Inspector of Police said, ‘this poof here in the dress made a much prettier job of getting arrested than you’re doing.’

  Angry eyes.

  They sat opposite each other in the back of the Garda truck, retracing the journey that Max had made so triumphantly a few minutes before. How different were things now! His costume, which previously had been his armour, his triumphal robe, was now just a stupid dress. Max had been hauled in by the law on many occasions, but this was the first time he had done it wearing women’s clothes. He hated it. Still, in a way he was lucky. At least you don’t get thirty years in the slammer for wearing lippy and wasting police time. You did, however, for a five-year career as a terrorist, and both he and Rosalie knew it. She was going to watch the world die, helpless to stop it, from behind prison bars.

  ‘How did they suss you?’ she asked.

  Max was ready for this one.

  ‘Oh, you know, performance is a myriad of subtleties,’ he said earnestly. ‘You get one gesture or expression out of place, even a thought, one tiny nuance, and the edifice crumbles. A single tiny moment misjudged and the whole house of cards collapses.’

  ‘Your man here got an erection,’ the policewoman said cheerfully.

  ‘An erection!’ Rosalie gasped in astonishment.

  Max was mortified. With every moment he was becoming more and more attracted to Rosalie. And now this! Shame covered him as if it had been mixed with custard and poured on his head. He loved this girl, he knew that. He had felt it from the first moment they had met. He loved her soft Irish voice. He loved the tough things she did. He’d seen her in her underwear and he loved that too. What he wanted most in the world was to impress her, and he had a sneaking suspicion that the manner of his exposure was unlikely to do so.

  ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ the policewoman continued happily. ‘A big whopper, right there in his lap. I nearly hung my cap on it!’ She was having a lovely day, this WPC. You didn’t often get a chance to arrest movie stars in drag on the west coast of Ireland.

  ‘That’s enough of that, Constable,’ the Inspector admonished sternly and silence fell for a moment.

  Rosalie looked round. Searching for the source of the stiffy. There were two policemen and a policewoman. Rosalie knew that Max was not gay, not only from his reputation, but also from the way she had noticed him looking at her. That left the WPC. Rosalie was not one to judge a person by their appearance, but this girl did not look the sort to provoke uncontrollable trouser-based excitement. Particularly in a man who had recently been married to one of Hollywood’s sexiest stars. The policewoman was large and rather dumpy.., very attractive in many ways, no doubt, lovely hair, but scarcely an instant erection trigger.

  ‘How come you got a hard-on then?’ Rosalie asked Max finally, fixing him with her steady, unblinking, green eyes. Eyes that Max usually found drop-dead gorgeous, but at the present time found intrusive and frankly intimidating.

  ‘Uhm, well… I just couldn’t help it,’ he replied.

  ‘I presumed you couldn’t help it,’ Rosalie snapped. ‘I didn’t think you’d sat there and induced the damn thing. Why couldn’t you help it?’

  Somebody had once told Max that honesty was the best policy.

  ‘Look, Rosalie … It was amazing, you know? My performance. To pull it off like that, to trick all those cops. It was like a career triumph, like winning an Oscar or something.

  Rosalie’s eyes said it all. Whoever had told Max that honesty was the best policy was wrong.

  Parting of the ways.

  By the time the police convoy arrived back in Dublin, Max was almost tired of those gorgeous green eyes that he had found so fascinating since the first day he had seen them. They had glared at him in silent fury for the entire journey. They were so fierce and strong that Max was actually beginning to fear that their impact might by now have left permanent marks on his face.

  The reason for Rosalie’s fury was not just that Max’s vanity had been the cause of her being about to spend the rest of her life in a cell. She was a reasonable woman and aware that the Garda were clearly on to her, and that she would have got nicked whether Max was there or not. No, her fury went much deeper than that, for it was fuelled by a wounded heart.

  She liked Max. He had already saved her life once, in Plastic Tolstoy’s Claustrosphere, and she had liked him then. Even tough, no-nonsense terrorist fighters have a romantic side, and Rosalie’s was very well developed indeed. She was a wild country girl raised on fairy tales and ancient myths. If gorgeous handsome men wanted to risk their lives on her behalf, then she didn’t mind a bit. Rosalie had wondered from the start whether Max might not be a little sweet on her, from the way she had caught him looking at her. However, she was not a vain woman, and thought it unlikely that such a colossal and rich star could be showing anything other than a passing interest.

  Therefore, when for a second time he had offered to save her bacon, she had been deeply moved. Rosalie had been brought up to believe that when you love someone you’ll do anything to look after them and protect them. That certainly seemed to be what Max was doing. After all, aiding the escape of serious criminals was a pretty big crime in itself and Max had walked into it without a murmur. Now it turned out the whole episode had just been about an actor’s vanity, a vanity so great that it had eventually ended in Rosalie getting arrested anyway. He didn’t like her at all, he had just used her as an opportunity to show off. She hated him. She hated him because she had started to fall in love with him, and now she would never see him again.

  The little Garda convoy eventually pulled up in the courtyard of Dublin’s Central Police Station. Max was removed first.

  ‘Rosalie, I’ll —‘ he started to say.

  ‘I wish I’d never met you at all,’ she said, her eyes no longer fierce and strong, but liquid with sadness. ‘And I never want to see you again.’

  ‘You won’t, love,�
� the Inspector assured her. ‘They don’t put men in women’s prisons, not even transvestites.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  Unlikely saviour

  Exit pursued by love.

  Max was deported the next day. Nathan met him at the airport and was with him when the Garda escorted him to the plane. Except, of course, they did not get as far as the plane, not for quite a while anyway. Dublin Airport Authority, like all airport authorities, seemed to see it as their principal duty to herd passengers as far down the departure process as possible, before informing them that there will be a two-hour delay. They do not inform you that you are passing the last lavatory or the last bar or the last newspaper shop. That is something you discover for yourself once ensconced in a place called a departure ‘lounge’, which is defined as a room in which the sole facility is an inadequate number of plastic seats.

  They stood, leaning against the wall. Nathan, Max and the two cops. For once it was Max’s mind that was utterly preoccupied with affairs of the heart. All Max could think about was those green eyes staring at him and then filling with tears. Astonishingly, Nathan was not, for the moment, thinking of his beloved and unattainable Flossie. When you are talking about a movie, even love sometimes has to take a back seat.

  ‘I have this great idea for the plot of our film,’ he had said to Max when they met.

  ‘If it’s anything to do with cross-dressing, forget it. I’ll kill you if you ever breathe a word of what happened,’ Max snapped, ‘and believe me, I know how to kill.’

  ‘No, no, it’s a bigger thing, a thematic curve.’ Nathan was very, very excited. ‘I am very, very excited,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t care, I’m not interested. The world is a hollow and empty place and I am the hollowest and emptiest thing in it.’ Max turned to the officers who were escorting him. ‘Listen, guys. I have let down a woman I think I am in love with. I have to make it up to her, please unlock the cuffs.’

  The officers did not move. Max pressed on.

  ‘Please, guys. Try to forget for a minute that you’re tough, hard, ball-breaking peace officers and get in touch with the child inside you. Ask that child what he would do.’

  ‘We’re doing you a favour putting you on a plane, son,’ the first officer replied. ‘If you start a relationship by apologising to a bird, you’ll be under the thumb all your life. Jesus, you’ll be after asking permission to go and get pissed in the pub.’

  ‘That’s right, pal. You have to be tough, forceful,’ the second officer added. ‘If you love this little lady, then ring her from the States and say, “All right, so I fucked up. So what? Do you have a problem with that, darling?” Tell her that and if she does have a problem with it, then tell her that she can fuck right off. There’s plenty of birds in the world that aren’t so fucking choosy.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said the first officer. ‘Besides which, you’re better off sat in the pub anyway. At least your money’s your own.’

  ‘Thanks, guys. You’ve been real,’ Max said, and the group lapsed into silence. The Irish cops’ attitude reminded Nathan of the cops he had met at the Beverly Hills Fortified Village. He wondered whether this relaxed attitude to romance was common to all policemen. Maybe if he joined the police he would get over Flossie. Damn! He had let his mind wander on to Flossie again. Now he was as sad as Max.

  Protective custody.

  After Max had parted from Rosalie she had been taken to an interrogation room and asked a lot of questions about Mother

  Earth. She, of course, had told the police nothing. Partly because she would rather have died than sing, and partly because, like all members of even vaguely efficient secret organisations, she actually knew very little.

  She did not, for instance, know where Mother Earth’s detailed knowledge of the next environmental hot-spots came from. And she could not have told the police, even had she wanted to, how her unit and others like it were always able to be at the heart of the action so quickly.

  ‘The intelligence people look after that stuff,’ she told her interrogators. ‘We just go where we’re told.’

  ‘So who pays?’ they had asked, as they always did in such circumstances, Mother Earth finances being so notoriously shadowy.

  ‘Rich green fellas, I guess,’ Rosalie replied, and she knew no more than that. She had, of course, heard the rumours, as everyone had, that some megabillionaires were finally beginning to see sense. That they were turning the funds they had acquired destroying the Earth to the job of saving it. Rosalie did not, however, have any better idea than the police as to whom these dubious philanthropists might be.

  ‘Oh, come on!’ barked the policeman. ‘The kind of equipment you people carry doesn’t materialise out of thin air! That automatic rifle you were caught with is a state-of-the-art weapon. Our men don’t have anything as good as that. Who the hell is supplying all that stuff?’

  ‘I don’t know, gentlemen, and if I did 1 certainly would not be after telling you now, would I? Now if you’re going to torture me, will you please do me the courtesy of getting it over with?’

  The chief officer adopted a slightly offended but still censorial tone.

  ‘Sorry to disappoint you, Miss, but contrary to hysterical rumour we do not torture people. Not unless you count the food. Take her down, Constable.’

  ‘When do I get to see a lawyer?’ Rosalie asked as she was hauled to her feet by a tough WPC.

  ‘You can see a lawyer in America. Good day, Miss.’

  And to Rosalie’s surprise, she discovered that she was not to be tried in Ireland at all, but handed over to the FBI for extradition to America. There she would face trial for the DigiMac Studio raid. Her departure was set for the following day. A magistrate had already issued the appropriate authorisation and there were no avenues of appeal. In vain did Rosalie protest that this was completely illegal, that they could not just hand over a European citizen to the American authorities. The truth was, of course, that they could do what they liked and were going to. The European Federation was so utterly plagued with terrorists (terrorism having taken over from car theft as the number one crime) that they were absolutely delighted when another country offered to take one off their hands. The head of the Irish Special Branch of EuroPol had actually phoned the US ambassador to tell him that they had hundreds more suspected terrorists awaiting trial, and the FBI were welcome to as many of them as they wanted. On behalf of the Bureau, the ambassador had politely declined the offer.

  What kind of G-man are you?

  The following evening, the Garda handed Rosalie over to the custody of the American authorities, embodied in this case by Special Agent Judy Schwartz.

  ‘Hi, I’m Special Agent Judy Schwartz,’ said Judy, offering Rosalie his hand. She kept hers, which were handcuffed together, firmly in her lap.

  ‘You’re a G-man?’ she said. ‘You don’t look like one.’

  ‘Oh, well, I can explain that. What happens is, when there’s any rough stuff, what I do is I rush into a telephone box and put on fifteen stone of pure muscle and I get so handsome and cool it’s terrifying.’

  Judy didn’t know why he bothered really, it never changed. No matter how many times he tackled nerdism head on, it never got any better. Ever since he had arrived in Dublin and met his opposite numbers in the Garda Special Branch he had been aware of the sniggering that followed him about. Judy sort of understood. The media had decreed many decades before what a secret agent should look like and it just wasn’t like Judy. Judy realised that it was not really the fault of the people who laughed at him. It was society in general. After all, if you’re a policeman and you’re told that the FBI are sending an agent to pick up a terrorist, you do not expect somebody with one leg shorter than the other, thick glasses and crooked teeth. Judy sort of understood, but it still hurt, even after all these years.

  Judy would have been pleased to know that on this occasion his little anti-nerdism joke did at least hit home. Rosalie nearly apologised, but then stopped he
rself. This man was, after all, going to haul her off for trial in the States. On reflection, she didn’t care if she had offended him or not.

  ‘I’ll take charge of the prisoner now,’ Judy said to the officers who were flanking Rosalie, but they did not move away. Instead, one of them snapped open one of the cuffs on Rosalie’s wrist and locked it on his own.

  ‘You’re still on European soil, Agent Schwartz. We have to escort you and the prisoner to the airport and put you both on the plane.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Judy said. ‘Well, I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist that, in the interests of security, the suspect is handcuffed to me.’

  Judy met the surprised look of the big policeman steadily.

  ‘This case is extremely important to the Bureau,’ he explained. ‘Ms Connolly is an experienced criminal, known to be shrewd, resourceful and tough. I cannot take any chances on us losing her.’

  It took some guts to say it. There were four Garda officers in the room, and any one of them, including the woman constable, could have just about put Judy in their pocket. They laughed at him, of course. Even Rosalie could not help sniggering at the man’s front.

  ‘So what you’re saying, Agent Schwartz,’ the Inspector asked, ‘is that, in the event of the suspect playing silly buggers, you feel that you will be better placed to prevent her escape than my officers? Is that it?’

  ‘I have been very highly trained, sir. No offence is intended.’

  The Inspector just laughed again and instructed his man to handcuff the suspect to the American, if that was what he wanted. Judy asked for the key but was told perfunctorily that it was not Garda policy to leave the key with the man wearing the handcuffs. Judy could have it when they were on the plane.

  And in this manner they left for the airport, Judy, Rosalie and two Garda officers. It was pretty much at the same time that Max and Nathan were heading out the same way. Rosalie, however, was destined to miss her plane.