All the Lives He Led-A Novel (19 page)

Gerda shook her head commiseratingly, but she didn’t say anything. What she did was get up and fetch a couple of glasses, along with a bottle of Maury’s wine. “Here’s to better times,” she said, and I drank to it with goodwill. She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “He wasn’t just an ordinary embezzler, though, was he?”

I drained my glass. Then I gave her the truthful answer. I told her about the day when Merrilee Bournemouth had come to our house. She didn’t look like a video star then. She looked haggard, and she was begging for every clue we could give her that might help her figure out Uncle Devious’s whereabouts.

Mom didn’t want to tell the woman a thing. She suspected that Uncle D had been banging Merrilee all along—certainly since her sister’s death, and most probably for quite a while before it. (He had, too.) But Dad hadn’t been that suspicious, I guess. He told Merrilee all he knew, which was essentially everything we’d told the various law enforcers and not much help to anybody. And then a few days later the cops began to ask us if we knew where Merrilee Bournemouth had taken herself to.

We didn’t know the answer to that. Neither did they. Not then. Not until later that year when the plan to blow up Inner Mongolia’s city of Hohhot got ratted out by the ticked-off girlfriend of one of the terrorist explosive experts. In the subsequent ruckus they said Uncle D was killed and Merrilee got paralyzed by a couple of fletches in her lower spine, and the whole thing came out. What that whole thing had financed was three or four years of arsons and assassinations in Inner Mongolia and Outer, along with parts of Siberia and several of the neighboring Stans. And all the money that financed those goings-on had come right out of the very deep pockets of my charitable uncle.

“From the Tibetan orphans’ fund,” Gerda guessed.

“Sort of. Ultimately. But a lot of those funds had been siphoned out to the Dalai Lama’s fund for indigent Mongolians—that was another of Uncle Devious’s little charities. And then, through several cut-outs, dribbled to the terrorists as needed. To the other terrorists, I mean, because, you’re right, that’s what Uncle Devious had been all along.”

Gerda was silent for a moment. “Interesting,” she pronounced, “but I think that’s about enough talk, don’t you think? I’m sleepy,” she added, nibbling at my ear, “but not too sleepy. So why don’t we go back to bed?”

So we did. I was glad to change the subject. I guess I had been afraid that having a terrorist for an uncle would make her think less of me. It didn’t, though.

The lesson I had long ago learned, but did my best not to think about, was that things that are too good to last don’t last. And the proof of that came the next day when Gerda, looking sorrowful, came by the wineshop right at the peak of the tourist business. It was, of course, raining.

I braced myself. Whatever the news was going to be, I wasn’t going to like it. I began to worry in earnest. It was bad enough that she was going to tell me something I was going to hate; I didn’t want to hear it surrounded by my customers.

I had one possible way out. I looked pleadingly across the Via dell’Abbondanza to where Cedric the Pimp was lounging in his doorway, and sure enough he took the hint. “Go,” he called, ambling across the narrow street toward me. “We aren’t busy right now. I’ll take care of your shop.”

So I left Cedric dishing out wine for the thirsty crowd—and, of course, for himself—and I pulled Gerda down the street. “What?” I asked as soon as we had found a sheltered doorway to get into.

She shook her head mournfully. “It’s my gram, Brad dear. They’ve put her in intensive care.” She squeezed my hand. I didn’t squeeze back. “But the worst part,” she said, “is they don’t really seem to know whether she’s going to make it. Hon, I’m sorry, but I don’t have any choice, do I? I hate it, but I just have to go.”

Her eyes were actually misting.

I couldn’t tell her not to do it, could I? Even if my telling her would have as much as slowed her down, which I was quite sure it wouldn’t. I could have mentioned that her family seemed to be having a pretty lousy summer, but I didn’t say that, either. So all I did was ask her where dear old Gram was dying, and when she said, “She’s got that place up in Sirmione,” I had to ask where Sirmione was. Up in the lake district, about as far as you could get in Italy before it turned into Switzerland, she said. And when I pointed out, trying to get the facts straight, that neither the
Chang Jang
nor its sister ship, the
Haihe,
was expected back for days and probably wouldn’t be heading that way if they were, she shook her head affectionately. “I wouldn’t be going by zep, hon. Too slow. I’ll just grab a superspeed rail out of Naples and I’ll be there in two hours.”

That sounded a little better to me. I ventured, “So you probably won’t be gone that long.”

But she was sorrowfully shaking her head again. “Oh, sweetie, well, you know you can’t predict these things, can you? It might be just overnight. It might be, I don’t know, a lot longer than that. But you know I’ll try to get back when I can.” And a kiss on the cheek and a quick half hug and Gerda was gone. Until when, not specified, and maybe, oh, shit, maybe until goddamn never.

It was turning out to be another really bad day.

I stumbled back through the drizzle to my hole in the wall. The wine drinkers gawked at me and Cedric the Pimp gave me a commiserating little shake of the head before retreating—with a full cup of wine that I was sure wasn’t his first—to his own side of the via. It seemed our conversation hadn’t been quite as quiet as I’d thought.

The rest of my shift that day seemed to last forever. And when it was over so did that whole night.

11

MY DEAR LOVE GONE, AGAIN

Among all the other things that were wrong with the world was that our whole part of the Italian peninsula went through another rainy patch just then. And attendance was down.

That didn’t make sense to me. Sure, sometimes the weather cut down the number of people showing up on a given day. But not this much. Customers just weren’t showing up the way they had been. The Bastard said we were down over 10 percent, and he said it to me the way he said most things, as though it was my fault.

Losing any customers at all was bad for me. It hurt my chances of making an honest as—all right, an as, never mind the honest part—out of my moneychanging or wine-recycling fiddles. On the other hand, the good part, or the not good at all but actually the worse part, the worst as hell part was that my outgoing cash flow had dwindled, too. The dwindling was good. The reason for the dwindling, though, was that Gerda wasn’t around to use up all my spare euros on impetuous runs into Naples for a couple of drinks in the Galleria or taking rides in rental cars down the coast to gaze at the hot mud fountains that looked the way parts of Yellowstone must have looked before it went ape.

Gerda wasn’t just not there. She didn’t even call.

You know what was tough for me to understand?

Intellectually, I mean? The fact that I really missed her.

I hadn’t ever really missed a human being before. It made me feel foolish. That didn’t stop the missing pain, it just added one more way of feeling bad to the sufficient number of ways I already had. So to try to take my mind off all those things, what I found myself doing, more than ever, was checking, almost obsessively checking, the news pages. Some of the news, of course, was simply too lousy to make anybody feel better, except maybe some mega-misanthrope that wanted the whole human race horribly destroyed. That was what the Pompeii Flu news was like, and it got worse every day.

Actually, that helped a little. I didn’t care much about purely local horrors. If fifty passengers were turned into well-done hamburgers when their railbugs plowed into a broken-down internal combustion truck on the same high-speed track—well, that wasn’t really cheering me up any, no, but at least it reminded me that there were people in the world worse off than I was. And anyway, the particular railbug line where that had happened ran from Boston to the Maine coast, nowhere near the one Gerda would have been on.

If indeed she had taken the high-speed rail at all, of course.

There was a lot of that sort of thing on the news, too. Terrorism seemed to be having an uptick, and some of their actions were pretty spectacular. When the New Falangists set fire to the copy of Columbus’s ship
Santa Maria
where it had been moored for the past century or so at the foot of Barcelona’s Las Ramblas it was mildly interesting, although I’d never been in Barcelona, and didn’t care much about Christopher Columbus. (It did get a little more interesting when a team of Barcelona firemen tried to put it out, and a delayed-action bomb killed them all.) Then the Flat Earth Society guys knocked the heads off the statues in Moscow’s Cosmonaut Park on the grounds that space travel was a hoax … and the Hebrides Society bombed London’s Albert Memorial to protest England’s murder of Mary, Queen of Scots … and the Rock of Ages Purifiers swiped a couple of ultralights and dropped porno pictures over most of Salt Lake City. And like that, over and over again.

It seemed to me that there was too much of that sort of thing. No one else seemed to care, though. Cedric the Pimp listened patiently to me one rainy morning when nobody seemed to be wandering down our street, but all he said was, “Yeah, it’s a shame,” and scurried back across the via when a couple of figures strolled toward us. They didn’t really matter. They were just virts. But it was obvious that he had taken the excuse to leave because the subject either bored or frightened him.

My best bet for someone to talk to, just as in old pre-Gerda days, was Maury Tesch. He was still pretty moody, but once again reliably up at almost any time for a quick game of CIA Against the Militants or Planning Nine Eleven All Over Again—or, more likely, chess, because he didn’t really like the machine games. But then, once when he had checkmated me in a dozen moves and was setting the pieces up for the next game, I mentioned my notion that the terrorists were getting more active and he said wisely, “What’s worrying you, Brad? Is it your idea that there’s some big terror offensive going on?”

“Well, something like that, maybe,” I admitted.

He shook his head. “Think about it, Brad. Remember what I said back at that briefing about this kind of thing?” I didn’t. “Well,” he said, sounding a little miffed, “let me spell it out for you. What’ve all these attacks got in common?” He didn’t pause to give me a chance to guess. He went right on. “They’re all local, do you see? Small groups. Limited objectives. If you just go by what you see on the news you have to think that the days of concerted attacks all over the place are done. And,” he said earnestly, “there are good reasons why they might be. They’re too damn big. They take so many people in so many places to work, and somebody’s always going to rat them out. And then they’ll all get bagged and spend the rest of their lives in some jail. Right?”

This time he did pause for a comment from me, but I didn’t have one. He didn’t seem to mind. “No, Brad,” he went on, “you can forget that. If there are ever going to be more large-scale operations that cross national lines I guarantee there won’t be more than a handful of people involved.”

“Well,” I said, “what about something like this Pompeii Flu?”

Now he was shaking his head sorrowfully. Evidently I had said something stupid. “Brad, have you heard of any terrorist group claiming credit for the Flu?” I gave him a head shake of my own. “Or make any demands? Or even show that they were hitting some specific target?”

“Well,” I said, “the Jubilee?”

He shook his head harder than ever. “Be reasonable, Brad,” he said. “Why would anybody hate the Jubilee that much?”

I was getting to be uncomfortable with the subject. “I guess no reason, Maury. Unless you could say it’s the whole human race that’s the target.”

He said patiently, “And who would hate the whole human race that much?”

I had an answer for that. “Martians,” I said wisely. “Once they get rid of us they can steal our women and our water.”

That made him grin. Not right away, because Maury didn’t have that much of a sense of humor. But then the grin did arrive, and, “Ah,” he said, suddenly sunny again, “you’re joking. So we agree, that’s one thing we don’t have to worry about? Good. Now you’re white, so what’s your first move?”

So I made one. And, of course, lost again, and after a while wandered back to my room to sleep.

You might think that Maury’s positive kind of comments might have reassured me, a little, anyway. They didn’t. They only made it easier for me to concentrate on my real and pressing womanless condition.

Which I did, that night and most of the next, right up to the time when Elfreda Barcowicz decided to become part of my life.

The way she did it, she plumped herself down beside me while I was having a solitary beer at one of those outside-the-wall sidewalk cafés and said, “Hi.”

By then Elfreda had already paired up three times in the previous week or two, twice with tourists and once with my successor at the flour mill, none of those joinings lasting much more than a few days. I hadn’t really kept tabs on her, but if asked I would have guessed that she was at present hooked up with the muscleman, Jamie Hardesty. She wasn’t, though. “That rat Jamie,” she told me right away, “is the reason so many good girls go gay. Talk about full of himself! Mind if I join you for a drink?”

I didn’t, particularly. It wouldn’t have mattered if I did because she’d already flagged down a waitress and ordered a grappa and lemon soda, and when it arrived she paid for it herself, so quickly that I wouldn’t have had a chance to do it myself even if I’d wanted to. I have to say that, after Gerda’s high-maintenance habits, that made a refreshing change. So, to be sociable, I asked, “Weren’t you going with him?”

“Was, yes. Not now. What is it with you guys, you’re all scared of making a commitment?”

“Commitment” was not a word I would have associated with Elfreda’s track record. I made the mistake of asking her what kind of commitment she was talking about, because she told me. “I’m a healthy, normal woman, Brad,” she explained. “What I want is good old-fashioned true long love. That’s ‘true.’ And ‘long.’ You follow me? The kind of love where the two of you turn old and gray together, and when one of you finally dies the other one lasts maybe a month or two and then she’s gone, too. Or he is; doesn’t matter which goes first. They both die, and then the crematorium mixes their ashes in one big urn and then casts them into, I don’t know, Lake Superior.”