Then one day, idly checking the recent convict releases, I came across a name I thought I had heard before. On the list of felons released from the Alaska rehab center was one Arthur Daniel Mason, formerly of the Molly Pitcher Redeployment Village in Staten Island, and I did know him. He was the kid who had tried to recruit me for some junior terrorist thing a long, long time ago.
I paid a fair extra tab for the backgrounding service. When consulted it gave me some interesting data. Artie had been sentenced to the rehab center, but one day he got away. Found an Inuit fisherman who agreed to take him across the strait to Siberia. Spent the next ten years in the Stans, but then his father died back in New York. Artie took a chance on sneaking home for the funeral. That was a bad idea. Security picked him up. And he was just now released.
I thought about it for a long, long time. Then, the next time Shao-pin stopped by my house, I gave her a welcoming kiss, told her she was looking even prettier than usual, and mentioned that I was thinking of going to New York City to visit an old friend, and asked if she’d like to come along and see some shows.
She accepted right away. I don’t know if she really cared about Broadway shows, especially the ones that were financed by the city to keep some sort of tourist business going, but I had been pretty sure she’d come along to make sure I didn’t get into trouble.
We took a hardwing from Naples all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to New York. It cost the Earth. I didn’t mind. I didn’t want to be gone too long, either.
Of course, no one knew who I was. Security had introduced me to a group of theatrical makeup people, and they had turned me into a well-to-do elderly Chinese gentleman, apparently taking his pretty granddaughter to see some famous old sights. The hotel I picked was one where I had been quite seriously roughed up by a New York cop who thought I was planning to rob some of their guests (I was). But it was recently spruced up and, the travel agent promised, quite comfortable, and when we got there the two off-duty New York cops I’d hired for bodyguards were waiting for us in the lobby. I sent Shao-pin with one of the cops to inspect our suites, making sure they were both comfortable and defensible.
Then I asked the cop who stayed with me, “I wonder if you can do me a favor. I’m looking for a friend of mine who got in trouble with the law. They just let him out of that Alaska correctional center, but I don’t know where he’s living. His name’s Artie Mason. Do you guys keep track of people like him?”
They did, as I had been pretty sure they did, but I had to listen to five minutes of advice before he admitted it. He hated to see me waste my time. Them terrorist gangs took kids and, you know, kind of brainwashed them? And you’d never get them to straighten out and be good God-fearing Americans again? And—
I finally stopped him. I told him that Artie had been the son of my late mother’s best friend and I was just trying to do for him what my mother would have done if she had lived. And I mentioned that it seemed to me that it might take him an extra hour or even two to do that for me and he should make sure that was on the bill when I paid him.
He mentioned that he might be able to get it faster than that. I said that if so that would be his good luck, because I was willing to pay the extra thousand—that’s $500 an hour times two hours—for the favor. Sounds high, sure, but it was in American money, and it cheered him right up. So when Shao-pin and the other cop came back he disappeared into one of the spare rooms in my suite and when he came back he handed me a slip of paper with two addresses on it, one geographical, the other electronic.
Then I wrote two notes to Artie saying I might be able to help him and inviting him to dinner the next night, got a hotel messenger for the hard copy, filed the electronic one on the net, and took Shao-pin—along of course, with the two cops—out to what was said to be New York’s best restaurant for dinner.
I’ve had better, but it wasn’t bad. The cops were ecstatic.
The meal the next night, with Artie Mason, was just as good although it was from the hotel’s room service. (But Shao-pin had paid a visit to the hotel’s kitchens to talk to the head chef, and money had changed hands.) Artie was certainly impressed.
The other thing he obviously was was suspicious. He was perfectly willing to tell me about life in the joint, and about the umiak voyage to a frozen beach in Siberia. Not as much about how he got through that huge and empty Russian province to its border with one of the Stans, and he wouldn’t even say which Stan. And about his own life in the Stans after he got there a fair amount, but in an account significantly low on names.
I listened with pleasure as Artie worked his way through the lobster bisque, the salad, the amuse-bouche that followed, and the perfectly grilled, perfectly marbled steaks that followed that. I was enjoying his story on its merits—my God, what a virt play it could make!—but what I enjoyed even more was the way he had told it without incriminating any other person.
When Artie couldn’t face the Tahitian prawns that followed the steaks he put down his fork and turned to me helplessly. I chuckled. “Full up, are you? Well, let’s talk for a bit. Then we can eat some more, or the chefs will be glad to wrap the rest of the food up for you to take home. I said that I might be able to help you out with some of your money needs, didn’t I? Let me show you what I was talking about.” I reached into the pocket of my silk jacket and pulled out the little rubycolored coil Gerda had entrusted to me. “This comes from the Stans. It seems to have something to do with a Belorussian bank there, and it may give access to something like a safe-deposit box they have. What I need is for someone to go there and find out what’s going on. For that I’m willing to pay at least fifty thousand euros—I said euros, Artie, not dollars—plus expenses. That’s for just doing the job. If you find answers to some of the natural questions there’ll be bonuses. Oh, and if you agree to do it I’ll start paying the fifty thousand, at the rate of one thousand a month, beginning tomorrow.” He was giving me a cold, if attentive, stare. I added, “One other thing. As far as I know, none of this gets you into legal trouble. I don’t think anything you will do in America violates any American law. If you want to check this out for yourself you can go to any lawyer you like and ask him and I’ll pay his bill. What do you say?”
He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Let me think for a bit. And while I’m doing that why don’t we have those prawns?”
He didn’t say yes right away. But he did ultimately say yes, between the baked Alaska (I thought that would amuse him, and I guess it did) and the brandies that came with the coffee. And when I dreamed that night Gerda was as loving and as sweet as she had ever been.
33
WAITING FOR ARTIE
Artie Mason had taken me up on my offer, all of it. I really hadn’t had much doubt that he would—what other options did the poor slob have? And anyway when he said he’d do it I on the spot handed him the first thousand euros I’d promised to start paying, so he left the hotel that night with a smile on his face and the most money he’d seen in decades, or maybe ever, in his pocket—as well as a brand-new tendency to avoid alleys and doorways that might hold a mugger. (Though any mugger who would select somebody who looked as certifiably penniless as Artie Mason to attack clearly had no aptitude for the work.) I couldn’t help asking him how long he thought it would be before he could give me at least a preliminary report. Dumb question. There was no way Artie could answer it until he was on the scene, but he was polite enough to say, “That’s hard to estimate, but I’d guess at least a couple of weeks.” And I had to be satisfied with that—
Well, with that and the welcome attentions of the Gerda of my dreams that night. She might be only the phantasm of a dream, but she surely knew how to show appreciation.
There was a little new problem, though, that I hadn’t expected. Those dreams of Gerda were extremely nice, but they had one serious flaw. That is, that’s what they were. Dreams. They weren’t real. And physically speaking I was a healthy male in my twenties, which is to say at the peak of my sexual
curve, and while I was getting ready to fall asleep I couldn’t help thinking that just a few dozen meters away, in the bedroom of the suite next door, was an equally healthy and sexually peaking female who had made it clear she would do pretty much anything I ever asked her to.
I wasn’t planning to do anything about it in any practical sense. Still, I couldn’t help reflecting that there were possibilities there that I wasn’t exploiting. It wasn’t even that I thought Dream Gerda would be jealous. Real Gerda certainly wouldn’t have been, I was sure. Under those circumstances she would have cheered me on.
The two weeks Artie had mentioned went by, and two weeks more before I heard from him. And then it was just one of those electronic greeting cards, with room for a few words. Artie didn’t need many. His message was just “Doing fine, more later.” And then nothing at all for another few weeks.
Of course there was nothing I could do about it but rehearse patience. My stock of patience continued to get help from Dream Gerda, which I took to mean she appreciated that I was doing the best I could for her plans, whatever they were … .
Well, no. Wait a minute. That’s not exactly right.
I wasn’t brought up to be superstitious, and I didn’t really think that Gerda was making that long, dreary trip back from the grave every night just to give me my jollies so I’d stay vigorous in her cause.
If anyone had asked me to explain it I guess I would have replied with more of that psychoanalytic babble that I hated so much when somebody tried it on me. You know, my id can open up as a whole other person. Or some other piece of my personality can disguise itself as Dream Gerda. Or whatever—that sort of thing.
That sort of analysis didn’t mean that I was enjoying those dreams any less, of course.
But, also of course, there were some objective facts at work here. One of them was, as I’ve said, that I was a healthy male in my twenties for whom wet dreams weren’t quite enough. And I noticed that I had begun looking at Shao-pin in quite a different way.
While I was waiting for Artie to get on with the job I was paying him to do—and while, I admit, I was sometimes beginning to have the unworthy suspicion that he was taking my money and laughing himself sick over my gullibility in some Stans gin mill—I tried to keep myself busy with attention to my own affairs.
One of those affairs was my own astonishing prosperity.
With all its faults, the human race had one trait that was of considerable benefit to me. They were all insatiably curious to get an in-the-flesh look at the guy who not only had banged the head Flu terrorist, but had ratted her out to her death.
That was weird. In a creepy way I felt that it was almost flattering to me. It was also immensely profitable. Remember I once worried that Shao-pin’s 10 percent might not pay for her trouble? Actually it had already made her a multimillionaire. In euros. How much money it had earned for me I don’t know. I didn’t even have to show up for performances to earn it anymore. From the virts of the ones I had already done the techs had put together three or four docudramas—with me talking and varied shots of Gerda and everyone else involved sprinkled in. A lot of the stuff about Gerda was pretty racy. They had taken every intimate thing I ever said about her and slanted them to make them look more intimate still. I didn’t mind, though. Why should I care what they think? And Gerda didn’t mind, either, because she was too dead to have an opinion one way or the other.
Then there were the things I was discovering in those coils the professor had given me. For example, at some point Bu Deng’s (male) true love had come back into his life. That didn’t directly affect me, except that the man was large in all dimensions, almost the same size as Bu himself, and he looked vaguely familiar. I puzzled over that from time to time, replaying bits from all over those coils, until one day when Shao-pin was in the house, checking her ledgers against the ones my household accounts kept for her and I had retired to my bedroom to get out of her way. I was playing bits from the coils to give myself something to do. I had reached one episode where the stranger and Bu were the principal figures (I’ll tell you about it later) when, for the first time, I caught a fragment of conversation between a man and a woman also present. I had to play that little fragment four or five times before (my excitement mounting) I was sure what they said, but then I was:
Woman: I thought he was never going to quit until he offed old Harry.
Man: I guess those royal guards were just too much for him. Anyway he says he’s giving it up.
That was it! “Old Harry.” “Royal guards.” They had to be talking about the ancient and decrepit king of England, Henry IX. And that meant that Bu’s lover was in fact a much younger version of the man I had known as that hater of the British royal family, Jeremy Jonathan Jones, otherwise known as the Bastard who ran all the behind-the-scenes operations at the Jubilee.
It was a revelation. The colonel had told me to keep the coil secret, but this was too good to keep to myself, and how fortunate it was that Shao-pin was only a couple of corridors away. When I asked her on the house intercom to come and join me she didn’t ask why. She was there in minutes, and when she heard what I had just discovered she was even more excited than I was. “But this is wonderful!” she cried. “It puts Gerda and this Jones person together earlier than anyone knew!”
“Not to mention Maury Tesch,” I pointed out.
“No, Tesch, too,” she agreed. “All three of them together! Oh, Brad, I have to report this right away!”
That wasn’t the kind of response I had expected, but I could see that for Shao-pin it was inevitable. I cleared my throat. “And if they want to know where I got those coils?”
For a moment she looked stricken, but then brightened. “I’ll report it to the colonel and let him handle it. Excuse me for a moment—” But of course I wouldn’t do that until she told me that, yes, the colonel was indeed still alive and, yes, he had had a confirmed case of the Flu, and now his life was no longer in danger but he had suffered some disfigurement.
She left me then, withdrawing to my dressing room to make her call, leaving me to think about exactly what that word “disfigurement” might mean. When she came back I was quick to offer her some wine, some coffee, just about anything she wanted, because I suddenly didn’t want her to leave. She put up a little resistance, but when I offered to show her the exact point at which Gerda first began to believe that the enemy was the entire human race she gave in.
I could tell that she was wondering why I was so reluctant to let her leave.
The curious thing is that at that point so was I.
34
THE PHONE CALL
As I was running the coil to the exact spot I wanted I had to explain to Shao-pin that Gerda was allowed to attend an occasional luncheon with that dealer in potions and spells, Bu Deng. In this one they were at the luncheon table in his grapevine arbor with six or eight of the other good-looking young women that were Bu’s favorite guests. Gerda was seated on Bu’s right hand and was busily trying to get Bu to get specific about what militarized disease organisms he had, and would he ever show her how they worked? He wouldn’t. He got a touch testy about it once or twice, too. At that point Gerda immediately backed off and began to tell him how much she appreciated being asked to join him for the meal and how beautiful everything was.
Well, that was easy conversation for her to manufacture. Beautiful was what everything was in Bu’s mansion. Bu himself was a very Westernized Chinese, whose favorite apparel was knee-length plaid shorts, open-toed sandals, and the kind of huge fly-eye goggles that the Antica people chose to wear. He liked to have his luncheons, six or eight female guests at a time, within one of the dozen or so grape arbors on his estate, surrounded by the vines to dilute the heat of the sun, with Bu’s expensive stingless bees doing what bees did so well on flowering plants and Bu’s personal Stannish manservant bringing them small increments of delicious foods. It was clear that Gerda wanted to get back to her questions about the militarized disease organisms Bu mi
ght have created to give the Stans a bargaining chip in dealing with the outside world. Bu was being indulgent enough to let her come titillatingly close. There was a minute or two of lighthearted chatter among the lunchers—
And then Bu’s phone went off.
Half a minute later so did Gerda’s, and of course, so did most of the other phones in the world because they were from some people trying to tell some other people some horrid news. Gerda’s call was from the junior surgeon, Rollo. “Are you still at Bu’s,” he asked—had to ask, because she had turned off her vision circuits.
“Where else would I be?” she asked. “Is something the matter?”
“It surely is, heavenly bod,” he said. “Get yourself to the nearest news screen! A big piece of America is blowing itself up.”
It quickly became obvious that what Rollo was trying to tell Gerda about, of course, was Yellowstone, the super-volcano that changed everybody’s life when it blew in 2062. My own life included.
For everybody Yellowstone was scary. It gave some really bad dreams to just about every human being on Earth in just the same way. But for Gerda it was worse. It threatened her very sense of purpose.
All the Lives He Led-A Novel Page 31