16
BACK IN THE HANDS OF SECURITY, ALAS
It was definitely Piranha Woman, and she wasn’t alone. Two of those hulking Security knee-breakers were right there with her and they weren’t being amiable. If they cared about my beat-up condition they didn’t let it interfere with business. They didn’t even give me time to get dressed, just to pull on a pair of pants to go with the work shirt I seemed to have been sleeping in. No shoes. And it was the middle of the night, and those damn Pompeiian street stones were cold.
I expected them to drag me to the place where I’d been interviewed the first time. That didn’t happen. They pushed me into a three-wheeled truck and we bounced past the Vesuvius Gate and up the hill. And when the truck stopped it was at the clump of old cottages where the volunteers slept. Where Gerda slept, when she was home. Wouldn’t be likely ever to sleep there again, though, because when they shoved me into her place—the door wide open, a Security bruiser standing guard—the first thing I saw was somebody lying sprawled and unmoving on the floor.
For one scary, lump-in-the-throat moment I thought it might be Gerda. It wasn’t. It was a man, and one I recognized. Specifically it was my sausage-hoarding buddy, Maury Tesch. He was crumpled. He was bloody. And he was definitely dead.
I stood up as straight as I could. “Hell,” I said, making sure I got the exculpatory facts out as fast as possible, “I hope you’re not thinking I did this so I could, I don’t know, get even with him for what he did to me. Because I didn’t. It’s true Gerda gave me a key to her place but I didn’t use it today. I stayed right in my room. I’m afraid I have no way of proving that because there wasn’t anybody in the room but me, but—”
Piranha Woman raised her hand. “Sheridan,” she said, “shut up. We know you didn’t leave your room. Sergeant DiMoralis left a man outside your door in case whoever beat you up came back. Who’s that?”
I didn’t try to answer that one because I had no idea what she was asking this time. But actually the reason for that was that the person she was asking wasn’t me. It was another Security man, standing in the window alcove, and next to him another man I almost recognized as another volunteer from one of the cottages nearby.
The Security man was pointing at the other volunteer. “He saw the whole thing.” The man wasn’t asked to testify, though. The Security man did it for him. “He was taking out the trash when this Gerda Fleming person came in the back way,” he said. “Then a little later he heard a lot of yelling coming from her room.”
Piranha Woman snorted. “I don’t doubt he did,” she said. “Tesch probably made a lot of noise while he was being murdered.” Then she scowled. “Do you want something else?”
“Yes, Major. I want to take Gatti here to make his statement.”
“Go,” she said impatiently, and turned back to me. But I wasn’t looking at her. I was goggling at the man in the shadows, who came out now and, oh, my God, yes, that was the one all right, the one who had promised to get me next chance he got, and now had got it. Oh, I was in the deep stuff, for sure.
So what did I do? I did the only things I could do. I told Piranha Woman that this witness was a congenital liar who blamed me for Yellowstone and the ruin of his family’s fortunes.
It didn’t do any good. The major wasn’t interested. “Yes, of course you can try to deny it all when you get to your hearing, but right now what I want to know is what Fleming was up to. So tell me, Sheridan. Why did she do it? Was she punishing him for what he did to you, like you say? Or was it a lovers’ quarrel? Or what?”
Well, of course I didn’t know why Gerda had done it—if in fact Gerda had actually come back from dear, dying Grandma’s on Lake Garda (if that truly was where she had gone) and killed Maury for—for what? For getting me drunk and beating the crap out of me, as Piranha Woman would have it? It didn’t seem like an adequate motive to me.
That didn’t stop Piranha Woman. She kept on asking, endlessly and not a bit courteously, about that and about everything else I knew about Gerda Fleming, and about everything I had ever suspected or guessed or imagined about her. Then, when she was willing to accept for the moment that she had sucked every last Gerda datum out of my brain, the same about the late Maury Tesch. (Well, I wasn’t entirely candid with her about that. I told her about the drinking and all that, all right, but I was too hazy about some of the other stuff—like his plan to make me hide something under my skin—to want to get into it with her.) Then finally she was asking about anything else I might have known, heard, or dreamed that might bear on this matter. “Like what?” I asked at last. I was beginning to get over the shock and transition into the anger—at Major Yvonne Piranha Woman Feliciano, and at everybody around her, too.
She didn’t answer that. She didn’t believe in answers, only questions. But finally she ran out of those. She didn’t announce that fact to me, though. She didn’t say anything to me at all, just jerked her head at one of the Security goons, who got a firm grip on my arm and marched me out of the apartment and into the waiting Security van.
As we drove away he explained the rules: 1. Don’t leave Pompeii; 2. Keep my nose clean; 3. Keep my mouth shut. They weren’t hard to remember. They were pretty much what everybody had been ordering me to do for some time. He wasn’t entirely heartless, though. When he noticed I was having trouble sitting up straight he asked if my bruises were bothering me. When I said they were he nodded, perhaps sympathetically.
Didn’t do anything about it, of course. But did nod.
He didn’t tell me where we were going, but I recognized the signs. When we got to the Indentureds’ hostel building that contained my room he made martyr-like mumbles to himself about how many steps he had to climb to my floor. He climbed them all, though. He didn’t ask for a key to my door. He opened it with a key of his own, and looked around suspiciously before letting me in.
Nothing had changed. My bed was still as unmade as I had left it, the mess of odds and ends dropped wherever I had left them was the same. Clearly my housekeeping did not come up to his standards, but he just grunted, turned around, and started to leave.
Aches, pains, lack of sleep, my girl not only no longer apparently willing to work at it but now accused of being a murderess as well—I was a little light-headed and, I guess, had every reason to be. I can’t think of any other reason why, without conscious intent, I opened my mouth and said, “Too bad he took his sausages. They might’ve been some kind of clue.”
He paused. “What sausages?” So I told him what Maury had kept in my refrigerator, and that got his full attention. Out of my fridge he pulled my two cans of beer I’d brought back from my day’s labors, some wax paper Jiri had left behind—and how I had missed it when I was scrounging for anything that might have been considered edible I can’t say—and a couple of crumbs of meat, though nothing that resembled a whole sausage.
“What sausages are you talking about?” he asked me, without any affection at all in his voice.
“I guess that’s what’s left of them,” I said. The crumbs didn’t look to me appetizing enough to justify Maury’s devotion, but the Security man treated them as though they were emeralds. He sniffed at one crumb, then at another. He held the first one up to the light and sniffed it again—longer this time, a deep inhale with his nostrils almost touching the thing. Then he zipped them into his bag and gave me an accusing look. “Any other evidence you’re concealing?”
He wasn’t quite as fear-inspiring as Piranha Woman, so I took a chance on giving him a little lip. “I haven’t concealed any evidence. I’m the one who told you about the sausages in the first place. And anyway, there isn’t anything else—Oh, wait,” I said, remembering. “They aren’t exactly Maury’s anymore, but he did give me those bottles of dessert wine in the closet. They’re mine now, though.”
They weren’t, though. Not anymore. They had become the property of Security before I could blink, and the man lectured me at some length on the desirability of giving full cooperation t
o the authorities, concealing nothing, telling everything. He finished with his Three Commandments—Mouth Shut, Not Leaving, and, oh, yes, Nose Clean. Then he left. Taking the wine with him in one hand, what was left of the repulsive sausages in the other, leaving no hand for him to close the door.
I did it myself. After which there was nothing to keep me from swallowing a couple more pain pills before getting onto that rumpled cot and trying to finish out my night’s sleep. That is, nothing but the fact that my whole world had just blown up in my face, and there was nothing I could do about it.
Was it possible, was it by any extreme stretch of the imagination remotely possible, that my Gerda had, for what reason I could not begin to guess, actually murdered Maury?
I couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t deny the possibility, either, and so I stayed sitting on the edge of my bed, unable to figure out what to do and even less able to stop trying, until it was time to get in the shower and get dressed to go to work. I looked like hell. The liquid-bandage stuff camouflaged my wounds well enough, helped by the fact that my slave smock covered the worst of the others. I stopped at the infirmary to wheedle some more of the antipain stuff from the medics and was ready to go to work. Or as ready as I was ever going to be.
Which I did, wondering what unplanned and devastating disaster was going to strike me next.
Actually, when it arrived it didn’t appear to be that much of a disaster. It was just Elfreda Barcowicz. She showed up that afternoon, close to quitting time. Clearly she was once again intending to ask me a lot more of her annoying questions.
This time it wasn’t about—what was her name? Maris Morchan?—the murder victim in the Forum. (Which was good, because then I didn’t feel I wanted to tell her that Maury had known the woman before she got herself murdered.) This time Elfreda went straight for the heart. “I never cared much for Gerda Fleming,” she informed me, setting the coffee container she’d brought down on my counter and not even pretending to buy any of my wine, “but I wouldn’t have guessed she was a killer.”
I didn’t have an answer for that, and didn’t try. All I said was, “Go away, Elfreda.”
She shook her head at that. “We need to talk”—and as I started to point at the four or five wine-drinking customers, all interestedly listening to what she had to say—“no, not here, of course. But your shift’s up, and here’s your relief coming down the street, and let’s go somewhere quiet so we can have a nice little chat.”
So we did.
I guess I was pretty easy to talk into pretty much anything around then. My afternoon relief, Gianmarco di Maio, looked curious about Elfreda but didn’t say anything, and I followed her meekly away.
Well, all right. I might as well admit it. Things hadn’t been going all that well for me, and I must have been hungry for a kind word, especially from a female. Elfreda was no Gerda Fleming, but she was good-looking, and solicitous, and deeply, deeply interested in every word I had to say.
So I said a lot of them.
Never mind how I hadn’t wanted to mention some of the things Maury had said and done because I hadn’t wanted to get involved. All right. I still didn’t want to get involved. But the place Elfreda took me to was one of the fully restored villas used for those nine-person, five-hour dinners, and the “slave” watchman seemed to know her. At least all he did was turn around and look the other way when she led me inside, right past the “Chiuso. Non Entrare” sign on the door. We sat in the villa’s beautiful little courtyard, with its reflecting pool and all those sweet-smelling and meticulously tended flowers—real, not virt—in its garden all around us, and I guess I did, after all, get involved.
And when Elfreda decided she had got out of me everything that was worth the trouble of getting she leaned forward and planted a non-lustful sisterly kiss on my forehead. “Poor bastard,” she said. “Life hasn’t been treating you very well, has it?”
And was gone.
Oddly my little one-on-one with Elfreda had made me feel a little better. Not cheerful, of course. But not suicidal at least, and I stayed that way through my boring dinner at the staff mess hall, and all the while I watched the mostly unpleasant news on my opticle, right up to the time I got back to my room and sprawled across my cot and went instantly to sleep. So nothing specially upsetting had happened that day. It was the day after that that the sewage hit the aerator.
That day didn’t begin well. I set my opticle for a news channel to wake me up. That wasn’t really because I was so hot for newscasts. That had always been more Gerda’s thing than mine. But maybe it was one of those subaware things that the shrinks used to accuse me of, like, well, like some under-the-radar attempt to get some part of Gerda back. Anyway, what ended my (inadequate) night’s sleep was the opticle talking about terrorists. Particularly nasty terrorists, their specific cause not mentioned, who had taken over an air traffic control center in Luxembourg and flown three supersonics into three separate tourist zeppelins in three widely separated parts of Europe. The death toll was more than seventeen hundred, and that didn’t count the casualties on the ground. (The Chang Jang wasn’t among the three zeps named, so I supposed Chi-Leong’s little smuggling project was still on track.)
Then, as a follow-up, there was also a story about a gang of ten or twelve other terrorists (these having something to do with Inuit people and whales) who had died that day, when the nuke warheads they were trying to salvage from a sunken Gulf War Three submarine went off unexpectedly. So all the losses weren’t all on the same side. It didn’t seem like a fair trade, though, especially if you counted out the probable local casualties from nuke fallout. Then, as soon as I got out of the shower, there was a note on my cell from dear old Mom, subject matter very much like the other dozen or so that had been accumulating that month. New York’s summer was miserably hot. Dad was depressed. The weather statement said another darn hurricane might be coming up the coast. The Conklins down the hall weren’t doing their share of keeping the bathroom tidy. And, oh, yes, Dad’s dentures got chipped when he slammed the nightstand drawer on them and the insurance wouldn’t cover the bill for new ones. Which was my mother’s way of reminding me that there hadn’t been much money coming in from Pompeii lately.
Add to that that I couldn’t find a clean topshirt to wear.
All depressing, right? And, as usual, then things got worse. As I was pulling on the least armpitty of the shirts in my laundry bag there was a knock on my door. No. Not a knock. A lot of knocks, thunderously impatient ones, and when I opened it there was Piranha Woman with two of her goons flanking her. The bigger of the two already had his fist clenched for more and louder knocks, but Piranha Woman stopped him. “You, Sheridan, you haven’t been honest with us,” she called. “You better come along now.”
I didn’t ask where. The goons discouraged questioning. We rode in silence, at least until the car took a sharp turn and, out the window, I caught sight of something whale-shaped and huge, way off on the horizon. “Is that the Chang Jang?” I asked. “With all those police blimpets and choppers all around it?”
The bigger of the two at least looked where I had been looking. He must have seen what I had seen: the air-whale shape of a giant zep—I guessed the Chang Jang—no more than three or four kilometers down the coast, and around it clouds of aircraft and smaller airships, like flies around a horse dropping. He didn’t say anything, though, and the smaller one didn’t even give it a glance. Perhaps because he was aware of the steely gaze Piranha Woman had fixed on him.
So I was left wondering, and then the car stopped. I wasn’t at all surprised that the place where we wound up was the place I well remembered from a couple of nights before, Piranha Woman’s private interrogation chamber. It didn’t look a bit more welcoming than it had the last time.
I didn’t expect that this interrogation would be any better than my previous ones. It wasn’t. It was a lot worse. For one thing, I went through it naked; they made me strip and they carried everything I had taken off away, for wha
t kind of laboratory inspection I could only guess. This time they didn’t skip the cavity searches, either. For them my modesty was not a concern.
Then they stretched me out on a thing like a massage table, and one of the Security guards, this one in white scrubs, was rubbing something greasy over my naked body while another had one hand on my shoulder to remind me not to object.
Did I mention that this whole procedure was being done in the presence of a fair-sized audience? There was Piranha Woman herself, her male partner from that long-ago first meeting, the two uniforms who had brought me there with a few of their buddies, a pretty young uniformed woman wearing a data monocle and a dictation mike and, surprise, old Professor Mazzini, spryly perched on a gurney against one wall of the room, the one who’d taught our orientation classes before Piranha Woman took over. It was a pretty full house. It would’ve been nice if I could have sold tickets.
Then another goon in white, this one apparently female, approached me. She was holding something roughly the size and shape of a flashlight, but with a shiny, five-centimeter freely spinning metal ball where a bulb and reflector should have been. Which she employed, I had no idea why, to roll around over my exposed skin. All of it. And along with everybody else in the room—Professor, Piranha Woman, guards, and all—she was watching some kind of a colorful, shape-changing display on a wall screen that I could barely see out of the corner of my eye. Then, having thoroughly explored all my back surfaces, the two goons turned me over to get at my front and I had a better view. Of what exactly I could not say; the images on the screen made no sense to me, although I did observe that every time she moved her roller ball on my body the colors and shapes jerked and flowed.
Outside of the screen, and me, there wasn’t much to look at in the room. Against one wall was a table with the crumbs of Maury’s sausage and the two bottles of wine they’d commandeered. It was chilly in the room, too. For their comfort more than mine, I’m sure, they had the air-conditioning turned way up. I had goose bumps on my arms before they started the rub-a-dub-dub on my body, and well before they got through I was definitely shivering. Not that any of them cared. Not that I cared much myself, because what they were doing took my mind off my personal comfort.
All the Lives He Led-A Novel Page 19