by Ben Elton
Hard on this thought came a newsbreak. The terrible toxic spills in the European capital were of course the top story, and Judy forlornly watched the footage in the ludicrous hope that some clue as to the source of the disaster might emerge. He saw none. After the news there was another commercial break, and suddenly, while he watched the first advert, Judy got his clue. The penny finally dropped.
Unwelcome prodigal.
Judy now knew which road he had to take. He drained his cognac, finished his brioche and went off to make his peace with the FBI.
He did not relish returning. He had had no contact with them since absconding with Rosalie at Dublin airport, having avoided any form of communication on the not unreasonable grounds that if they had known where he was, they would have instantly arrested him. However, Judy was pretty certain that he had finally worked out what was going on and he needed the Bureau’s resources to prove it.
The preparations which Judy made before facing his old boss were both thorough and unpleasant. He dropped all of his ID down a drain, a drain now so filled with dangerous poisons that the chances of the documents ever seeing the light again were zero. Next, Judy rolled around a bit in the wet gutter in order to give himself a dishevelled appearance then, finally and most painfully, he selected the toughest looking fellow in the toughest looking bar he could find and threw a glass of beer in his face.
Crawling out into the street ten minutes later, his eyes blackened and his nose broken, Judy was soon picked up by the police.
‘I am an FBI agent who has just escaped from terrorists. I demand to see the American consulate.’
And so it was that Judy made his way back to the US where the FBI placed him under arrest and asked him to explain himself.
It did not go down well.
‘You’re actually trying to tell me,’ Klaw bellowed, ‘that this woman dragged you on to the luggage conveyor, off the luggage conveyor, through a huge crowd full of soldiers and cops and yet you were unable to stop her!’
‘That is correct, sir,’ said Judy through his puffed and swollen lips.
‘No, Schwartz,’ Klaw insisted, ‘it is not correct. I do not believe it, not even you could fail so spectacularly in your duty. I believe that for reasons of your own you helped this girl escape.’
‘Reasons, sir? What reasons could I possibly have for helping a terrorist?’
Klaw hurled the photos of Rosalie down upon his desk.
‘Pale skin reasons! Green eyes reasons! Cute little tits and ass reasons! You wanted to get laid, didn’t you, Schwartz?’
‘Sir, I —‘
‘Don’t argue with me! You saw that you had one chance in your life to pork a really fuckable piece and you took it. Look at you! You’re disgusting. A deformed, half-crippled little nerd. When did you last get any? Never, that’s when. What kind of life is that? Then suddenly you’re chained to some dream pussy. And I’ll bet she was pushing it out, wasn’t she? Baiting the honey trap? Of course she was. She knew a contemptible, inadequate piece of shit when she saw one. You weakened, didn’t you, Schwartz? You followed your nasty little dick and it’s going to lead you straight to the cage. Now what have you got to say?’
‘I’m gay, sir.
‘Nothing! Like I thought…‘ Klaw paused for a moment as the statement sunk in’… say what?’
‘I’m gay, sir, what’s more I’ve been legally bound to my husband for twelve years. We were married in San Francisco. It’s all in my file, sir.’
Klaw scrolled furiously through Judy’s computer file. To his horror, it turned out that Judy was right.
‘I didn’t know we took you guys in the Bureau.’
‘Sir, the FBI has been legally obliged to employ a representative quota of homosexuals for over sixty years now.
‘Oh… yeah, I did hear that, actually.’
‘Besides, sir. Hoover was gay.’
‘That’s a damn lie!’
Klaw was rather shaken. He had thought he had Judy’s case all sewn up, and now it appeared that he would have to think again, something he hated doing. In fact, he rather disliked even having to think the first time, let alone having to do it again. It had never occurred to Klaw that Judy was gay, nor had it occurred to any of Judy’s other colleagues. He never mentioned his private life while at work, so people just made the usual presumption of heterosexuality. The bullies who taunted him as a ‘queer’ did so because they were dimwits, not because they had an astute eye for people’s sexual preferences.
Judy seized on the moment of Klaw’s confusion to press home his version of events.
‘Ms Connolly managed to lift my gun, sir. She threatened to shoot both myself and any bystanders who got in the way. We were in a crowded airport, sir, I thought it best to accede to her demands.’ Judy was rather hoping that Klaw had heard no reports of Judy’s shouted allegiance to The Elitest Church of Christ the Crew-cut. Klaw’s silence suggested that he had not, and Judy felt safe to carry on with his story. ‘She had people at the airport and I was effectively a captive of Mother Earth from that point on. They kept me with them in the hope that they might learn something of Bureau policy towards them from me.’ Judy paused for a moment and then remarked with casual stoicism, ‘As you can see, sir, their methods of persuasion were not of the gentlest.’
Klaw eyed Judy’s wounds. They certainly looked painful.
‘What did you tell them?’ Klaw inquired.
Judy tried to look shocked.
‘I am a Federal Agent, sir. I told them nothing of either our policies or agents. In fact, they got nothing from me at all.’
Judy got away with it. Klaw had no proof of wrongdoing, could find no motive, and the fact that Judy had returned voluntarily did not correspond with the idea that he had absconded. The Bureau was forced to accept that he had genuinely been captured in the line of duty. Which meant, to their horror, that they had to give him a Purple Heart for his wounds. They made it clear in the citation however that he had utterly disgraced the whole organisation by being captured by an unarmed woman whilst he had the support of two police officers. Judy, who had never been popular in the Bureau, was now a marked man. He never ate in the canteen, never used the toilets and locked any room in which he was working.
The lonesome trail finally gets warm.
Judy had no time to get distressed about his ostracism. He cared not one jot for the opinion of the majority of his colleagues anyway. The cold, lonesome trail which he had been following for so long was finally beginning to warm up a little. Judy set himself the task of finding out which adverts had followed which news bulletins for the last twenty or thirty years. He wanted to know what products were being pushed when environmental disaster was the top story. Day after day he ploughed through the records of the broadcasting companies, the copyright libraries and indeed the FBI itself, which monitored all electronic media.
‘Sounds absolutely fascinating,’ Judy’s husband Roger said to him, as he dabbed calamine lotion on to Judy’s swollen eyes the evening after his return to work. ‘Being a secret agent must be just so incredible.’
‘I can’t really tell you what it’s about, Roger,’ Judy apologised. ‘Can’t tell me about thirty years of ad breaks? How will I ever get to sleep!’
Chapter Twenty-Three
The lull before the storm
Tired and emotional.
Whilst Judy was ferreting out a truth that would shortly put both Rosalie and Max in mortal danger, Rosalie had joined her lover at the George V Hotel in Paris. She was in a funny mood.
‘I want a holiday,’ she told Max after the laminate had been duly stretched. ‘I want a holiday a lot.’
‘Cool,’ said Max, who was pretty much on holiday all the time anyway.
‘I’m tired and I need a rest,’ she said.
‘Anytime is party time for me, babe. Let’s raise hell.’
‘I said I need a rest and don’t call me babe,’ said Rosalie. Had she been able to see into the future, Rosalie might have been
even more anxious for a break. The gift of foresight would have shown her how much more limited her travel options were soon to become. She could not, however, see into the future. What is more, she had suddenly become very confused about her past.
‘I don’t know what I’ve been doing, Max. I look back and it just doesn’t seem to make any sense.’
‘Welcome to my world, girl,’ said Max, ‘I feel that way nearly every morning.’
But Rosalie was crying.
The toxic waste action had been something of a watershed. It was bad enough, having one’s first action as a Facilitator degenerate into a massive environmental disaster, without the FBI popping up in the middle of it all and accusing you of the most extraordinary and horrendous things. That, coupled with the revelations that she had heard at Jurgen Thor’s house, had so utterly thrown Rosalie that her idealism and determination seemed suddenly to have deserted her. She had been on active service for an unbroken five years and was entitled to some leave.
It was to be the lull before the storm.
Language barrier.
She and Max headed south-west and took a little room in a small village in Provençe. Its sweet-smelling linen-covered quilt and little vase of flowers on the hand-painted dresser reminded both of them of the room in which they had first consummated their love. It made Rosalie feel a little lighter of heart. Max too felt good. A European tour with the person you love is something many a young American has dreamt of, and Max had always wanted to see the real France. He had found Paris a little snooty. He did not speak French and on a number of occasions, whilst desperate to get his bearings, he had approached a Parisian and made the apologetic appeal, ‘Excuse me, but do you speak English?’ only to be met by the infuriating riposte, ‘Yes, of course. Do you speak French?’
Nothing irritates the French cultural elite so much as the fact that, because of American economic hegemony after the Second World War, English became the dominant world language. The lingua franca, as it is called, as if to add insult to injury. It is a source of constant pain to the educated French that, but for a couple of unlucky results in the battles of the late eighteenth century, the United States would have been known as L’Etats-Unis, MacDonald’s would be selling Grands Macs and Rock ‘n’ Roll would be known as Rocher et Petit Pain. It is an understandable gripe for which Quebec and New Caledonia are no consolation at all.
Max had soon had enough of being patronised for being mono-lingual. His pride stung, he retreated to his hotel and holed himself up in his room, desperately cramming the French language. Virtual Reality had of course made learning the basics of a new language much easier than it had been in the past. It is universally acknowledged that the best way to learn to speak a foreign tongue is to plunge in amongst the natives. With a decent Linguafone VR helmet, it was possible to do just that in an extremely intense manner. Max spent days inside his helmet, visiting boulangeries, ordering café au lait and buying bus tickets over and over again.
A day in Provençe.
By the time he and Rosalie headed south, Max was very proud of his new skills and insisted on employing them to conduct all negotiations.
‘Vous avez une chambre pour la nuit, avec une salle de bain?’ he said, giving it plenty of Gallic intonation and pantomimic hand motion. All to no avail, as it happened. Max was a very good actor, but even he could not mime a bedroom with en suite bathroom. He was met with a blank stare.
‘I’m awfully sorry,’ the house agent said in a plummy English voice, ‘I’m afraid I don’t speak French.’
Rather disappointed, Max was forced to negotiate for their pretty little room in English.
Having settled in, and then settled in again in a different position, they set off to explore the village. It was not as much fun as they had hoped, confined as they were to hot dusty little BioTubes. Provençe, having long since given up any pretence at agriculture in order to concentrate on tourism, was not granted the convenience of orbital sun-screening. Since this meant that strolling outside was as hot and stuffy as staying inside, Rosalie suggested they drop in somewhere for a drink. This was an idea which Max never turned down and they made for a little cockney-style pub called The Dog and Duck.
‘Deux verres de yin rouge, s’il vous plaît,’ Max said firmly. Only to be met again with a non-comprehending look.
‘Nobody speaks French here, Max,’ Rosalie explained. ‘This is Provençe. The whole area became completely English-speaking over fifty years ago. They even drive on the left.’ She bought a couple of pints of bitter and they sat together, alone in the smoky snug.
Decent proposal.
Max was looking rather uncomfortable, a bit sheepish. There was something on his mind.
‘What’s up, Max?’ Rosalie inquired.
‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ he said. ‘Well, hey, that’s not true, it’s definitely a vibe, you know, if you think these things are important, which I think I do, it’s a vibe … I was just wondering if, well, basically, if you would marry me?’
Rosalie was caught rather off her guard. Her eyes stared and her face coloured to a deep blush. Green does not, on the whole, go with red, except maybe on apples and in this case on Rosalie, at least as far as Max was concerned. Staring into her eyes, Max felt that he had never seen anyone or anything look lovelier. Feeling rather that his proposal had done little or nothing to reflect the heart-stopping beauty of its object, Max dropped to one knee and tried again.
‘Rosalie, I love you. I would lay down my life for you in a heartbeat. Your eyes are like emeralds and your skin, when you aren’t blushing the way you happen to be now, is like ivory… with freckles. You care about stuff and your voice is smooth as Irish cream or something, and you can fight and handle a gun and I love you and you’ve got to marry me.’ Max paused, then added with a flourish, ‘Je t’aime.’
‘Lord Almighty, Max,’ said Rosalie, much taken aback. ‘That’s something to throw at a girl … You’ll have to give me time to think about it.’
‘Of course, of course. I understand.’
‘I’ve thought about it. All right I’ll marry you.’
That evening, over a celebration meal of traditional Provençal roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, followed by treacle pudding and custard, they discussed their wedding plans.
‘Only close friends,’ said Max firmly. ‘This is going to be a real wedding, not some Hollywood stunt. We charter only one Jumbo sub-orbital. That’s it, the limit, kapeesh? Two hundred and fifty guests from America, max. It’ll mean offending some people very dear to me, but I ain’t marrying them, am I? And no press! Just those we invite. Two magazines, two tabloids and any quality broadsheet that wants the story, obviously. Now, who do you want to do your dress? I think it would be a nice move if we used a Dublin designer.’
‘Max,’ said Rosalie, ‘I’m a criminal wanted in Europe and
America. If we get married it will have to be in total secrecy.
We can’t have any press, we can’t bring anybody over from
America.’
‘No one?’ Max asked, slightly stunned.
‘No one, I’m afraid, unless you want to spend your wedding night visiting me in jail.’
‘OK, so no one it is. Just my agent and my publicist then. Gee, that’s weird.’
‘No one, Max, not even your agent and your publicist. In fact, especially not them.’
Max chewed a ruminative mouthful of irradiated beef. The meat had been expertly reflavoured using only the finest chemicals and yet he scarcely tasted it. He was trying to get his head around the concept of doing something as big as getting married without his agent or his publicist. Who would handle the press? The fans? The cops? His mother? Then it dawned on him that none of these people would be there.
‘You actually want me to get married alone, don’t you?’ he asked.
‘Well, not entirely. I need to be there.’
‘Is it legal if the press don’t witness it? I mean, I kind of thought they had to be there.’
>
Rosalie gave Max’s hand an encouraging squeeze.
‘It’ll be all right, Max. No need to be nervous. People do things that haven’t been arranged by their agents and publicists all the time. In fact, most people don’t even have agents and publicists.’
Max was vaguely aware that this was the case, but after eight years as a super-celebrity he found it rather difficult to imagine. Eventually though, he accepted Rosalie’s argument.
‘OK, there’s a church in the square, let’s go knock up the padre.’
‘Are you out of your mind, Max? This is Provençe!’
‘So?’
‘Every church within twenty miles of here is Church of England! Sure, I’d rather get hitched in a witches’ coven.’
Nocturnal nuptials.
They left the little English carvery at about ten and headed north in their hire car. Rosalie drove, Max having had most of both of the bottles of wine they had ordered.
‘It isn’t always going to be me who drives, OK?’ she said. ‘I like a drink too, you know.’
‘Fine, sometimes we’ll take a taxi.’
After passing through several villages that were quite nice, but only quite, they came upon the perfect church in a little village called Donzère, about eight miles south of Montélimar. Despite it being nearly midnight (country time) they knocked up the priest.
‘Father. We want to get married and we’d like to do it now if that’s all right with you,’ Rosalie said in passable schoolgirl French.
‘Well, it is not,’ the priest replied in English. ‘Are you mad, coming here at this hour, I’ve a good mind to —’
‘Father,’ Rosalie interrupted him, ‘I’m a wanted terrorist and I can’t get married in the normal way. Now I’ve got a gun, and my fiancé here has suitcases full of money. Either one of these things is going to persuade you to marry us right now. Which is it to be?’