The Bastard wasn’t there yet, of course. It was his practice to come in early, yes, but never as early as that. They left me there, sitting next to his desk, with the door locked from outside.
When at last the Bastard did show up he had two messages for me. One was that I was the biggest asshole he had ever seen. The other was to keep my mouth shut and stay out of trouble. Then he got into a deep conversation with one of the soldiers. When finally he came over to me I naturally tried to ask him for some kind of an explanation. Naturally the Bastard told me to shut up and mind my own business or he would mind it for me.
So I did shut up. Not just because the Bastard told me to but also because I didn’t have much to say, since I had no real idea of what the hell was going on.
See, I had never imagined that I would even be a spectator to the murder of an Antica woman. Especially by a UN soldier. Especially when words like “atom bomb” and “terrorist” were being thrown around.
I was still trying to worry some sense out of the episode all the time the Bastard was yelling at me. I didn’t really even hear him. I wasn’t paying much attention to anything but the memories of the surprised look on the Antica woman’s face as the soldier shot her, and the way all that blood came spilling out, and the scary words that the soldier had used.
Out of the window I could see that at last the virts had come on, restoring Pompeii to its resuscitated life. One moment the naked Apollo statue on his marble pedestal was its natural dirty-ashtray black, the next it was brightly gleaming polished bronze, and the bow that Vesuvius had struck from his hands two thousand years earlier had magicked itself back—of course only as a virt—and he was ready to puncture some hapless tourist with one of his restored arrows. I didn’t take time to admire the view, because my head was busy with other things. I only really heard what the Bastard himself said, for that matter, when he was telling me—for, I think, the third or fourth time—to keep my goddamn mouth closed and get my goddamn ass to work. “And,” he added, “what the hell were you doing there anyway?”
I told him the truth. “I couldn’t sleep.”
That got me a full-fledged sneer. “Couldn’t sleep my Welsh ass. Do you know what kind of trouble you could get me in with Security? Now get the hell out of here, and, remember, not one damn word to anybody.”
I couldn’t do that. This was too big to be swept under the carpet. I said reasonably, “But didn’t you hear what the soldier said? She said ‘atom bomb’ and ‘terrorist’!”
The Bastard sighed. “Jesus, Sheridan,” he said, “are you so dumb you don’t know an exercise when you see it? That wasn’t any real goddamn terrorist. Security was practicing for the way they would take a real nuclear terrorist out if one of them ever showed up around here.”
I couldn’t buy that. “That blood was about as real as—” I began.
The Bastard gave me a sneer. “Screw the blood! You imagined it! Don’t you know what—Wait a minute.”
He got the absent look of a man being spoken to on his private ear opticle, while his fingers played for a moment with the keys on his own blouse. Then he looked annoyed—at, as usual, the world, I thought at first. But then his eyes focused in my general direction, particularly at me. “You still here?” he demanded.
I tried reason. “The thing is, Bas—Jeremy, I mean, I actually saw that soldier shoot the other one in the throat. I saw the blood!”
“You saw the blood, you saw the blood! My God, Sheridan, how stupid are you? You’ve got virts all around you, and you don’t know virt blood when you see it!”
That was a stopper. “Virt blood?” I said. “Really? But honestly—”
“Go!” he said, mean and loud. “One more word and I’m debiting your account a hundred euros for misconduct.”
That was an injustice I couldn’t accept, but when I opened my mouth to say so he didn’t let me speak. “I said go,” he told me. “Do you want me to make it five hundred? And listen, forget about this whole thing. That’s an order. Watch your mouth. Don’t go talking about what you thought you saw or you’ll be getting something a whole lot worse than a fine.”
And that ended the discussion.
Well, I didn’t forget about it. I couldn’t. But I did watch my mouth, at least a little bit.
I didn’t say anything to anybody. I just hinted. Hinted to Maury Tesch when I saw him in the dressing room, with more than an hour still to spend before opening: “Maury? Did you hear anything about some weird stuff going on in the Forum this morning?”
Maury was speaking to me again, though just barely. “Of course I did,” he said. “Everybody knows that there were two drunken UN soldiers shooting it out. They say one of them’s not likely to live.”
That made me swallow, but I didn’t dispute Maury’s version. I just said, “Wow,” and went to my breakfast. And ten minutes later, feeding coins into the machines in the food court, I caught snatches of four or five other versions of the story, all different. And was no more than halfway through my creamed chipped beef-flavored tofu on toast, which I was eating pretty slowly because my mind was on other things, when someone sat down beside me. It was Elfreda Barcowicz, arriving with a coffee cup and an eager expression.
If she was still disappointed in me for carrying the torch for Gerda she was willing to overlook it for the sake of a good gossip. She wasted no time. “Did you hear? A bunch of UN guys got drunk and began shooting up the big amphitheater?”
I got cautious. “I thought it happened in the Forum.”
“Oh, no. It was the big amphitheater, all right, the one they didn’t fix up. And two of the UN guys died!” She added a heaping spoonful of sugar to her not much more than a spoonful of thick, black coffee. “Scary, isn’t it?” she added conversationally. “Armed drunks shooting off their guns in the middle of the night? Makes you wonder if it’s safe for us to be around here.”
That wasn’t what I was wondering about, though. What I was wondering about was whether all this was just the normal process of everybody getting things wrong, or somebody was manufacturing rumors in order to keep the truth obscured.
I looked her over more carefully than I usually did.
Elfreda didn’t fit into my usual notion of what somebody I could talk to would look like. She wasn’t—I mean, after I’d been spoiled by Gerda she wasn’t—quite sexy-looking enough to inflame my male instincts, and she wasn’t male enough to be a Maury Tesch kind of, well, pal. Though I don’t think I had really got used to the idea of having a pal at all.
But I did quite badly need to talk to somebody, so I gave it a shot. “Elfreda,” I said, “what would you say if I told you there was just one UN soldier involved, and what she did was shoot and kill an Antica woman because she thought the Antica woman was a terrorist who had a nuclear weapon … and the reason I know all this is because I was there and I saw it go down?”
It was Elfreda’s turn to look me over more carefully. She did. Then she said, “This is what I would say, Brad. I’d either say, a. you’re the damnedest liar I ever met, or b. you’re the biggest fool for talking about it.”
And she got up, leaving her undrunk coffee behind, and walked away.
Later on, when I was loading my breakfast dishes onto the conveyor belt the woman running it didn’t answer my “How’s it going?” And a couple of minutes later, when I saw one of my old gladiator acquaintances across the room and flipped him a good morning wave of the hand he turned and walked rapidly away. He wasn’t even one of the ones I had accidentally stabbed, either.
There wasn’t any doubt. I was back on the bad list. The word had gone out. I had been seen to be asking for trouble by spreading rumors the high-ups didn’t want spread and therefore I wasn’t popular. Everybody knows that trouble is more contagious than a head cold, and nobody wanted to catch my dose of trouble.
Well, I hadn’t ever been really popular. But it hadn’t been like now. Now I might just as well have been ringing a little silver bell and calling out, “Unclean! Un
clean!” as I walked.
13
DOGHOUSE DAYS
What happened the next week or so? Nothing.
For a while I had the idea that the cash customers at the wineshop must have heard something. They were definitely scarcer than they had been. The tips were even slimmer than usual, and hardly anybody gave me any euros to change to sesterces.
That was something I could check out, though. I had observed Cedric the Pimp slouching just inside the entrance to his faux bordello. So I abandoned my customerless shop to hustle across the via for a good morning chat. “Pretty slow this morning,” I observed experimentally, to see if he would take a chance on talking to me.
He glanced at me, then looked up and down the street to see if anyone was looking before he acknowledged what I had said. “You mean not so many customers? Oh, sure not. They’re scared,” he informed me.
“Of terrorists?” I said, and bit my tongue to keep from adding something about Antica women getting shot and UN soldiers going wild. He let me know right away that that wasn’t what he was talking about, though. “Not terrorists,” he said. “Pompeii Flu is what’s scaring them off. They’re afraid they might catch it if they come here. I can’t say I blame them.” Then he gave me an embarrassed grin before he did that even more embarrassed clearing of the throat that meant that the next thing was going to be the observation that a tiny little shot of Giubileo red would go down well right about then.
That happened. I didn’t mind. Cedric was willing to pay for his wine in the currency of conversation, and there were things I wanted to know.
Although I hadn’t really been paying attention it was true that I had noticed the crowds were smaller, and my guesses at the reason hadn’t made a lot of sense. But as soon as Cedric said the words it became obvious. Sure, there were all those news stories about people turning up sick after they’d been to the Jubilee, so who could blame your average tourist for thinking that this was the place to visit if you wanted to come down with Pompeii Flu, but not otherwise.
Well, I didn’t really mind that, either. The people who owned stock in the Giubileo might lose some dividends from customers’ nervousness. For me it just meant more time to stare into space and wish my life would get better.
Of course. If I’d thought it through it would have occurred to me that anything that cost me earnings was going to cost Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Sheridan of Molly Pitcher Redeployment Village back on Staten Island even more.
When I thought of that I did care, a little. Just a little, though. There was only one thing I really cared about, and that was the fact Gerda wasn’t around and there was nothing I could do about that.
So that’s the way the picture was. The crowds were down, Maury seemed to be avoiding me, and Gerda was absent. There wasn’t much that was good about the next few days.
The closest we came to excitement was when the authorities reran their teaser virts to build up a crowd for the big show. They showed the coming attractions scenes four or five times a day, and that had been sort of interesting. At least it was the first couple of dozen times they did it.
The only other thing I paid much attention to was the news. I won’t say I enjoyed it—I wasn’t really in the enjoyment business—but it did hold my interest most of the time, especially when the news they were talking about wasn’t related to the Pompeii Flu.
Of course, about their only other area of interest was some new outburst of terrorism. That sort of thing didn’t exactly make me feel better but at least those stories didn’t have Pompeii’s name on them and weren’t usually about anything nearby. For instance there was the Goan ferry captain who drove his little boat right into a cluster of half-submerged rocks, killing everybody aboard, including himself. He’d found out that most of his passengers were Christian missionaries on their way to bring Jesus to the part of Goa’s that were still heathens. And a train bombing in Kiev, and a sniper with a long-range rifle in the hills around Monte Cassino, picking off truck drivers on the Naples—Rome soprastrada … . And, oh, well, enough others to remind me how many terminally unhappy people there were in the world. Which did, sometimes and for a little while, take my mind off what an outstandingly crappy life I was having.
Of course there was one thing I could do. I could walk away from the whole situation.
There wasn’t really any way anybody could stop me. All I had to do was to walk out the Marina Gate and get on the electric to Naples and not come back.
Why not? After all, when I was still a punk teenager I had been able to survive on the mean streets of New York City, hadn’t I? How much harder could it be to do the same thing in Rome or Milan or, who knows, Tbilisi or Beijjng?
Well, yes, I had to admit that it would be somewhat harder, at least. There were big differences between then and now: a. I wasn’t fourteen anymore, b. I didn’t have my parents’ slum to hide out in if things got dicey, and more than that, c. when I was fourteen I hadn’t had the Krakow coal mines to look forward to if the cops caught me running out on my Indenture money.
And of course none of those was the real reason anyhow. Which was d. the one big misery that made all the others unimportant. Walking away from my life meant permanently and irretrievably walking away from whatever chance I had of a better life, which is to say a life with Gerda coming back. That far I was not yet prepared to go.
Put all those things together and you can see why I was not a happy camper. If asked I would have said that the situation could not get much worse. Which goes to show you how hopelessly, totally wrong I can always somehow manage to be.
After a few days things did begin to pick up, crowd-wise, a little bit at the Jubilee. Maybe some of the accelerating bad news that was coming in from the rest of the world relieved some of the Flu worries about visiting Pompeii. Whatever the reason, the customers did begin to come back. It was kids first, of course. On the Thursday a couple pairs of teenaged boys showed up, uneasily trotting along the Via dell’Abbondanza and paying no attention to any of the attractions, as though they had dared each other to make the visit and wished it were the hell over. None of them bought any wine from me, although that was the age group that had produced some of my best customers. None of them visited Cedric’s brothel, either, although their cohort had often provided the only customers he had. Then, Friday, there were more of those show-off teenage boys in somewhat larger groups. By Saturday the groups began to include a few girls, looking scared—or at least looking the way they elected to look, in order to make the boys they were with feel brave. And by the next weekend the crowds were pretty much back to normal quantities.
I don’t suppose the populace at large had become any less afraid of the Pompeii Flu, only that they had come to realize that there wasn’t any safety from it anywhere, because the news stories were beginning to show that you could catch it from any person who was infected, even if not yet showing symptoms, at any place in the world and any time.
Oh, yes. There was one interesting thing. Early one morning, when there was hardly anyone else around, Elfreda Barcowicz came by. She ordered a glass of my best Falernian, touched it to her lips, made a face and never touched it again. And said, in the tone of an inquisitor, “Listen, Brad, I’ve been worrying about you. Can I ask you something?”
I said she could, and so she came right out with it. “That story you were telling, the one about the shooting in the Forum. Tell me again what happened.”
This was, remember, the woman who had told me never to mention that subject to anybody ever again. I elected to be difficult. “I never said it happened,” I reminded her. “I just said suppose it happened.”
She sighed and tried again, this time sweetly. “Fine, I agree that’s what you said. So now I’m going to suppose that you’re in the Forum and it’s before start-up time, and you notice a woman from the Antica who’s also there.”
I decided not to be difficult anymore. “And there was a UN soldier, too,” I said. “And they got into an argument and the soldier shot th
e woman in the neck.” And then I added, “I thought.”
Elfreda pounced on that. “You thought?”
“We’re just supposing,” I reminded her.
She gave me an unfriendly look. “All right, Brad,” she said, all the honey having long since seeped out of her voice and her expression. “Go ahead. Be a son of a bitch if you want to, but I’m asking you for help. I know that something happened there. I know it must’ve been important, because Piranha Woman is threatening to call the Indenture loan from anybody who spreads rumors about it. So I believe that you really did see something. Sure you won’t be a reasonable guy and tell me about it? Not even if I promise not to drop the word about your deal with the Singaporeans?”
Now, that was a totally unexpected body blow. I heard myself gasp, I temporized. “Hell, Elfreda, I turned their deal down!”
She nodded morosely. “Sure you did. But is Piranha Woman going to believe you when you say it?” Then she sighed, surrendering. She stood up to go. “I guess I’d be cautious if I were you. Think it over, Brad. If you decide to trust me, remember that I can be a good friend.”
She didn’t wait for an answer. She just went, leaving me to meditate on the fact that, although there seemed to be a lot of secrets being kept around the Giubileo, my own secrets weren’t among them.
There was one other thing that made those hot summer days kind of interesting. It was another little terrorist attack on the Jubilee, this one taking place right there on my own Via dell’Abbondanza.
It wasn’t much of a threat. It was just three elderly women from some little town in South Carolina, and what they did was throw paint on some of Cedric’s dirty murals. They didn’t accomplish much, though. They had made the mistake of using that you-can-change-your-mind-if-you-want-to wall paint meant for the chronically undecided. It worked just as advertised. The Jubilee’s maintenance people got it all washed off before it set.
All the Lives He Led-A Novel Page 17