Truly unimportant. I might not even have remembered it at all if it hadn’t come right before that funny business with Maury Tesch.
14
THAT UNFUNNY FUNNY BUSINESS WITH MAURY TESCH
I was in the changing room after another lousy day of selling lousy wine to people who, by and large, I would just as soon have seen dead. Somebody called my name, and it was Maury.
He looked like hell. “What’s the matter?” I asked him.
He didn’t answer that. He just said, “Have you got anything special on for tonight?”
That was so improbable that it almost made me laugh. I didn’t, though. I just said, “What have you got in mind?”
He didn’t seem to have a ready answer for that. He thought for a few moments before he came up with any answer at all. “Anything you want, Brad,” he said beseechingly. “You’ve never been to my place, have you? Maybe you could come up there? I’ve got all kinds of vid stuff, or maybe just have a drink? Or, if you wanted some, like pills, I could get—”
I shook my head at the word “pills,” so he stopped there, with an expression like a puppy caught in a misdeed in his toilet training. He looked imploring. “Would you do it, please, Brad?” he coaxed. “I don’t want to be alone.”
Naturally I asked him why that was, but that seemed to be too hard a question for him. He mulled it over for a bit and then shook his head. “I can’t tell you that,” he said, and then again, “Please?”
If I had had the sense God gave a termite I would have told him, I don’t know, maybe something like I couldn’t do it because I had a date with one the local whores, I mean the freelance ones who hung around the Marina Gate, and I couldn’t get out of it because I’d paid a deposit when I reserved her services. I wasn’t smart enough to do that. I did what I was pretty sure I probably would regret doing later on. I said, “Oh, I guess so,” and finished dressing and followed him out the door.
Understand me here. I’m not saying that I particularly cared if Maury Tesch was suffering from the lonesome blues or not. I didn’t feel I owed him consideration as a friend, either, because I had long since decided that he wasn’t one, really. If I had a reason at all, I guess it was contemplating the possibility that Maury’s troubles might be real and hearing them might cheer me up.
It became evident that he was going to some pains to make the evening pleasant for me. I had assumed that we were going to have to climb the hill on foot in order to get to the support staff quarters. We didn’t, though. Maury had another three-wheeler and driver waiting for us. It took less than ten minutes before we pulled up in front of that dormitory building I had already seen on the way to the pine forest. It was at least twice as nice as Gerda’s, and in a whole other space-time continuum than my own. And when we got inside Maury’s rooms it was even more so. I didn’t know what to expect, though certainly I wasn’t expecting his actual four-room, two-bedroom suite, with little railed balconies outside the windows of the bedrooms and a personal steamcuzzi in the bath. Two of the rooms were made up as bedrooms, but only one seemed to be in use. In the other the bed—the double-width bed with its double-length pillows—had been stripped, and there were no personal items in the furnishings. “That was Walt Fossett’s room,” Maury said from behind me. “New Zealander. He got homesick so he quit. What would you like to drink?”
I said I’d like to be surprised. I was, too. When he opened the mirror over his personal wet bar what was behind it was a liquor cabinet. I had known, what every Indentured knew, that the plumbers and electricians and carpenters and computer geeks got paid more and got treated better than we did, but I hadn’t known just how very much better. I didn’t even know the names on some of those bottles.
So I said arbitrarily, “Is that tequila on the bottom shelf? I’ve never had any, and I’ve always wondered what it would be like.”
He had it, all right. Dipped the rim of a glass in a saucer of salt that was hiding behind the bottles, cut a slice off a lime plucked from a bowl of fruit, and served. When I tried the tequila I didn’t think it was bad. I wouldn’t have minded if my evening’s drinking had been limited to a couple more of the same. But Maury had other ideas.
Actually I didn’t think the imported Russian vodka he gave me to try next was bad, either. Or the Japanese rice wine that came after that, and somewhere around then I began to lose count. Maury was drinking some himself, though I wasn’t really keeping track of what or how much. He was talking, too, and at considerable length. Early on I tried to pay attention to what he was saying because the weird way he was acting had made me a little curious about what his specific troubles were, but after about my third or fourth drink he hadn’t got very lucid and I gave up trying.
Actually the kind of thing Maury was talking about wasn’t at all what I had expected from him. He wasn’t reciting a list of personal grievances. He wasn’t really talking about himself at all. Some of what he was saying had to do with how wrong it was for people who possessed power to do harm to people who didn’t have any power of their own—I think something like that, anyway. Later on I wished I had paid closer attention. But later on what Maury wanted didn’t much matter anymore.
Then a little of his rambling seemed to be about Gerda, and then I did prick up my ears. Or tried to, the best I could with all that alcohol swirling around inside me. But all he was saying was how Gerda and he used to be good friends but they weren’t anymore. And some of it was just nonsense, like some kind of story about the Antica woman, the one that the UN soldier had shot right in front of me, and why she had been there to get shot in the first place. But by the time he got to that I was way too full of his liquor to try to follow what he was trying to say. “Wanted to join,” I think he said—without ever saying join what, “but she wouldn’t have her.” Without ever saying who “she” was, either.
Take it all in all, and it was one of the most bizarre evenings of my life, and it had an even more bizarre, and nastier, ending.
What do I mean by bizarre?
Well, consider this. By about my fifth sampling of the inexhaustible contents of Maury’s liquor cabinet—or maybe it could have been the sixth or seventh—Maury suddenly up-ended his glass and swallowed right down the centimeter or so of Scotch that he had been nursing. He gave me a cold-sober look. “Do you want to know something? I lied to you about knowing Maris Morchan.”
“Knowing who?” I asked, because I was losing him again. It took a moment for me to connect the dots and get straight that Maris Morchan was the Antica woman I had seen the soldier blow away. When that had clarified itself in my head I said. “Oh, her. Sure. Say, I didn’t know you knew her.”
He gave me a look I can only call disgusted, though what he had to be disgusted about when it was his damn booze that was tangling up my thought processes I couldn’t say. He said, “Of course you didn’t. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. But listen, Brad, I never wanted to know her real well in the first place, because she was too crazy. Do you know what it was that she was carrying?”
“The soldier said it was an atom bomb,” I said, pleased to have remembered the answer.
The look he gave me then was definitely disgusted. “Atom bomb, my ass. Just killing her like that might have made some sense if that was what she had, but the grunt got it wrong. What Maris was carrying was a little glass tube full of anthrax bacteria. Are you hearing what I’m saying? Bacillus anthracis, that is, and I’m not talking about spores. I’m talking about the actual damn bacteria.” He paused to study his empty glass, then poured himself a refill. “You want to know how many ways that was stupid? One, the spores are about a hundred times as communicable as the bacteria. Two, they’re about forty times as lethal. Three, you know what she was going to try to do with her lousy bacteria? She was hoping to get them into the Giubileo water supply. My water supply! As if we wouldn’t have detected it in the first ten seconds!”
He hadn’t been paying attention to his hostly duties, so I cleared my throat to call
attention to the fact that I was holding an empty glass—God knows why, because I surely didn’t need any more drink. While he was recharging my glass I asked, to keep the conversation going, “Who’s ‘we’?”
This time the look he gave me was just irritated. “What?”
“You said we would have detected it. Who’s the we?”
“Me and my water-handling team, of course. The ones that handle all the hydrology for the Jubilee. What did you think they pay me for? To make sure nothing bad gets into the water here, that’s why. It’s my job.”
By then he had swallowed his last refill. While he was helping himself to another he gave me an odd sort of sidelong glance. “Anyway,” he said, “that isn’t what I wanted to talk to you about.”
Whatever that other subject was, he didn’t seem to be in any hurry to get to it. He took a tiny sip of his freshened drink, pursing his lips as though to taste it better. I thought he was going to speak when he finished rolling it around in his mouth, but that didn’t happen. He just took another sip, just as tiny.
I said, “Well?”
He shook his head reprovingly. “Don’t rush me, Brad. This is hard for me.” And then he was silent for a while longer, frowning as though he was thinking hard about something.
He didn’t tell me what, though, and that wasn’t cheering me up. I was beginning to feel really nervous—feeling drunk, too, of course, but still woozily worried. It was beginning to seem to me that it was time to get out of there. I cleared my throat, getting ready to say something like, “Gee, look at the time.”
I didn’t say it. Maury came out of his reverie long enough to say, “I told you, don’t rush me.” And he said it with enough anger that I decided to give him a little more time.
Only it was a lot more time. Several minutes, anyway. Then he said, “Did you ever happen to think if you wanted to hide something small and kind of flat—like one of those sestertius coins, you know?—a good place could just make a little incision and slide it under your skin?”
Drunk or sober, I knew what to say to that. “Hide what?” And knew pretty well that he was going to say he couldn’t tell me that. And then, just as I was making my mind up to just get out of my chair and go out through the door, he sighed. A long, deep sigh. But then he turned to me and gave me a real smile, apologetic and good-natured at the same time. “You wouldn’t want to do that, would you?”
He had lost me. Then I backtracked in my woozy mind to what he had just said. “Oh, you mean about hiding something under my skin, you mean? No, I don’t think I could do that.”
He gave me another sigh, a really sad-sounding one. “I was afraid that was what you would say,” he told me. Then his expression brightened. “Say, you look like you’re getting ready to leave,” he observed.
I didn’t either confirm or deny, just gave back as close a copy of Maury’s own smile as I could manage, and he nodded. “I guess all good things come to an end. Listen, I’m sorry if I’ve been giving you a hard time, but I was sort of thinking I would ask you for a favor, and then I realized I couldn’t do that.” He didn’t say what the favor was. What he did say, getting out of his own chair, was, “So let me fix you a stirrup cup, and I’ll call the car to pick you up.” He was already at his bar, back to me, mixing up something I really didn’t need.
But took. And swallowed. And that was when things really got weird.
How weird? you ask.
Well, the next thing I knew I was waking up—I hadn’t realized I had gone to sleep—and I was in a ditch halfway down the hill to old Pompeii.
That wasn’t all of it. I was also hurting like hell in several parts of my body. It started with my head, starting with what I was pretty sure was an earthquake-sized hangover.
And somebody was blinding me by shining a laser light in my eyes.
I could see a little if I squinted, and what I saw was a big uniformed Security guard holding the light, and he was talking to his just-as-big partner. They weren’t talking in English, but I understood them all right. The one with the light was pointing out that I stank of vomit, and I had probably been in a fight, and now they were going to have the rotten job of carrying me off to the lockup, and were probably going to get their nice clean uniforms all messed up with my throw-up, not to mention whatever else I might contaminate them with.
They didn’t like the prospect. I liked it even less.
15
MY LIFE AS A MURDER SUSPECT
The goons took me to what turned out to be a corner lockup, furnished with one (empty) jail cell along with one bored sergeant and two half-asleep patrolmen.
The sergeant took over. The first thing he did was send one of the uniforms off to Maury’s place in order to get his side of the story. That meant I had to stay in the lockup until she ran her errand and came back to report. (I didn’t mind that. I stretched out on one of the desks and went back to sleep. I guess I was still somewhat drunk.)
When she did get back she reported only partial success. She’d looked around his place and, yes, she found a lot of liquor there, but what she didn’t find was Maury himself. He was gone. When questioned the concierge said she hadn’t seen him leave—or seen me go, either—but admitted she might’ve been catching forty winks when traffic got slow.
The other thing she didn’t find was anything that clarified just what had gone on in Maury’s place after that final stirrup-cup drink.
The way it ended, after some telephoning to headquarters, the sergeant said I didn’t seem to have broken any serious laws, and he was pretty sure that I wasn’t the one who had beaten myself up, so after I filled out the incident report I could go home. The uniformed Security goon who had checked Maury’s place out—actually she was, you might say, a gooness, but she was as big and tough-looking as the males—took me back to my room, saw me inside, let me close the door on her.
It was broad daylight by then. I can’t say I was in great pain anymore. The sergeant had given me a couple of pills and they were doing a really good job of preventing my brain from finding out what my body’s pain receptors were doing their best to tell it.
As soon as the uniform was gone I collapsed onto my cot—dirty and pukey as I was; I thought briefly that I probably ought to get into the shower, but I was asleep before I even got as far as thinking the time to do it was right then, before I filthied up my bed linens. When I opened my eyes again it was once more dark.
Then I did drag myself to the shower. Then I sat on the edge of my cot, staring into space and pondering.
I did that for quite a while, but it didn’t help. I didn’t know what had happened, or why Maury had done whatever it had been that he did. I didn’t have any idea what these latest insane developments in my basically worthless life were all about, so I gave up. Then I got back into my cot, fastidiously trying to avoid the most messed-up parts, closed my eyes, and waited for sleep.
It came pretty quickly. I appreciated that, because while I was awake I kept asking myself questions for which I didn’t have any answers, and that just made me even more depressed.
I managed to sleep the clock all the way around, waking up just before daybreak the next morning. I should have been grateful for that, because it meant there were all those hours, maybe twelve or fourteen of them, in which I hadn’t been conscious and so hadn’t been torturing myself with questions and worries and regrets. That didn’t make me feel any better, though, and nothing else about that day did, either. It was a rough one.
It began about as badly as a day could, with my opticle waking me up and reminding me that missing a day’s work wasn’t good, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as missing two days would be. So I got up and got dressed in my Roman slave shift and went off to my day job as a purveyor of fine wines. Well, of wines.
Don’t ask me what happened on that shift. It passed. That’s all I can tell you. I talked to people now and then—talked to the cooks at breakfast, talked to Cedric the Pimp when he came over, all curiosity and thirst to find out what
had been going on with me—I don’t remember what I said to him but I’m pretty sure he went away unsatisfied in both departments. And of course I talked to the customers. I poured wine, and lied to them about how good it was, and I suppose I rinsed cups and made change, too. I might even—I couldn’t have been that far out of it—have wondered from time to time about Maury’s strange behavior, but of that I remember nothing at all.
It did end, finally. When it was over I grabbed some food, God knows what, and ingested it on my way back to my welcoming cot. (I did, this time, strip the dirty bedclothes and throw on a couple of clean sheets. I guess that meant I was beginning to come out of my shock.) Then I kicked off my sandals and shed most of my slave garments and hit my cot. I tried to find the faint aroma of Gerda that by rights should still be clinging to the pillows. I couldn’t find it, and then I was off to dreamland anyway. (Oh, I did dream, all right. I know I dreamed, but I don’t remember what any of those dreams were about. Which is probably just as well.)
The next day was the rough one.
It began about as badly as a day could. What I mean by that is that in the middle of the night some noises outside woke me just in time to see my door fly open and some really bright lights flash on, all of them directed at my face. “Maury?” I hazarded—remember, I was still pretty much asleep. I propped myself up on an elbow and tried to see past the laser torches people were aiming at me.
Turned out it wasn’t my old chess and drinking partner Maury Tesch, though. It was a woman’s voice that answered, and it was one I had heard before. “No,” Piranha Woman said—snarled, maybe. “I’m not your pal Tesch, who, as you probably know better than anybody, is certainly not going to be coming to visit you anymore, ever. Screw the small talk, Sheridan. Get your ass out of bed. We want to ask you some questions.”
All the Lives He Led-A Novel Page 18