All the Lives He Led-A Novel (20 page)

She was getting too somber for me, and besides what she was describing didn’t sound like the Elfreda Barcowicz I had thought I knew. I couldn’t help making a little joke. “That won’t happen,” I told her. “There’s still too much of the Yellowstone ashes in Lake Superior already.”

She gave me a withering look. “It doesn’t matter where the hell they cast the ashes, does it? The Mississippi River. Waikiki Beach. They could do it anywhere.”

I took it a step further. “Right here would be pretty good for ashes-dumping,” I suggested. “The zeps will be back any day, right? So you could do the casting from one of them as soon as it’s over the water. And, hey, there isn’t much you could do to the Bay of Naples that hasn’t been done already.”

Elfreda put down her second drink—this time it was one of those toxic Italian brandies that they make out of God knows what—and gave me the most reproachful look yet. “I hate sons of bitches like you,” she told me. “You take all the romance out of sex.”

I had realized by then that I was doing comedy where her skin was unexpectedly thin, but I couldn’t let that stand unchallenged. “Not true, Elfreda. I’m as romantic as anybody, honest. I’m all in favor of being in love with somebody, and having kids with her, and growing old with her, just like you said.”

She gazed at me in silence for a while. “Yeah,” she finally said, in a suddenly darker, more thoughtful mood. “You probably are. But not with me, right?” And she got up and walked away, leaving a centimeter of that poisonous brandy undrunk in her glass.

I could’ve sympathized a little with Elfreda. That was what she had been asking for. It wouldn’t have been much trouble for me and there was nothing to stop me. At that very moment Gerda might well be doing some old friend, or for that matter some new one, up there in the Italian lakes. And even if she wasn’t, she wouldn’t really have any serious grounds for complaint if I had just happened to do a little flirting—or maybe even a little down-to-earth recreational sex—with somebody else while she was gone. With Elfreda, say. Who had been really
inviting it
, and happened to be friendly (maybe too friendly), and was definitely smart (smart enough to have landed the plum job of keyboarding the Giubileo’s publicity in a nice air-conditioned office instead of sweating over a hot triclinum all day long) and that wasn’t all. Put Elfreda’s specs all together: slim waist, sweet hips, man’s-hand-sized breasts, cute little brown-eyed, full-lipped face. Looked at objectively, by which I mean not with the besotted vision of someone hopelessly smitten, like me, she was at least as good-looking as Gerda. And her earlobes said heterosexual, active, open to a good approach.

Nothing wrong there, was there? And I’d let her walk away.

I was back in my room and tugging my blankets into some sort of usable condition in my unmade cot, when there was a tapping on my door.

I did the usual quick guessing game. It wouldn’t have been Gerda; even if she had come back she wouldn’t knock. I doubted it was Elfreda giving me a second chance. The only thing I could figure was that Jiri’s wife had forgotten some of his goods. So I opened the door, and it wasn’t Jiri’s wife. Widow, I mean. What it was was a slim, slight Asian-looking man in formal shirt and shorts, with a bellybag and—remember, this was the middle of the night—wearing dark blue sunglasses.

He didn’t wait to be invited in. He politely nudged me out of the way so he could get past me, shut the door behind him, and said, “Good evening, Mr. Bradley Sheridan. Do you remember me? I am Eustace Chi-Leong. We were introduced by my honored father, Dr. Basil Chi-Leong, when you were kind enough to let us photograph you at your place of business. How are you?”

By then I did recognize him. He didn’t wait for me to get around to that, either. He rejected the unmade bed and the rickety old armchair I’d thrown my clothes on and seated himself on the straight-backed chair. Then he spoke right up. “Allow me to show you something,” he said, pulling a package out of his bellybag.

Whatever it was, it was wrapped in purple fabric, and judging by the care with which he unwrapped it, pretty valuable. The thing that finally came out of the several layers of wrap looked to me like a pewter gravy boat, fifteen or twenty centimeters long. “Is it not beautiful?” he asked me with pride.

Well, I supposed it was. I don’t know a lot about high-priced tableware, but the thing did have some pretty scenes of nymphs and centaurs engraved on it. If I’d discovered it in any hotel room I was robbing, back in the old days, I probably would have taken it along and tried to figure out how to fence it later. I said, “Looks expensive, anyway.”

He waved that off. “This chalice,” he said severely, “is made of platinum and is believed to have been made by Benvenuto Cellini. There is one like it in the papal treasury in Rome, not so good as this. That is all. There is no other anywhere in the world. The reason I have it now is that my esteemed father, Dr. Basil Chi-Leong, has purchased it as a gift for the collection of my grandmother, Madam Katey Chi-Leong, whom you have also met. He has asked me to invite you to help us get this chalice on the zeppelin,
Chang Jang
, which in some seventy-two hours will be moored over its repositioning depot along the shore of the bay. The zeppelin is then scheduled to depart for several destinations in North Africa, where arrangements can more easily be made to transport the chalice to our home in Singapore.” He gave me an appraising look. “Of course,” he added, “what we wish to do may not be considered entirely legal.”

“I kind of guessed that,” I told him.

He nodded. “For that reason,” he said, “you will be quite well compensated for your assistance. The figure my father mentioned was two thousand euros.”

He stopped, absentmindedly stroking the chalice in his lap, waiting for me to respond to the offer. But I knew better than to do that just then. I said, “Sounds like you’re in a hurry.”

He gave me an unfriendly look. “Is that so strange, with all the stories about disease vectors here at the Giubileo?” He paused. A moment later he nodded and said, “I will take it upon myself to increase the offer to five thousand. So can we count on your help, Mr. Sheridan?”

Well, when it came right down to it, they couldn’t.

None of the guys I roamed the streets with back in the Apple would have believed it if anyone had told them about it, but I backed away from the offer.

Before I did that I listened to everything he had to say, though, and I could see that he had really thought the thing through. “Yes, Mr. Sheridan, it is true that only passengers and crew are allowed by the zeppelin’s security to board it, but you must simply be more creative. After all, one need not pass through the established checkpoints. There are areas where their surveillance is somewhat lax, one of which being what is called the ‘honey-bucket system.’”

As I say, he’d thought it through.

Actually I was pretty sure that his schemes could work. Like all zeps, the
Chang Jang
had to remain in as close to neutral buoyancy as it could. So at every port of call, while the shoregoing passengers were doing their touristy things down below, the zep would make a quick trip to a pumping station on the ground. There the zep would settle down close to the surface. Mooring cables, along with three big hose pipes, then held it securely in place. One hose piped the zep’s accumulated waste water and sewage down to the honey wagons waiting below, while one of the other two sucked up an appropriate weight of fuel for their tank and the last one pumped up fresh water to go into the ballast tanks and the swimming pool, which doubled as their water reserve. The fuel would be burned. Much of the water became the carrier for the new sewage at their next stop.

And, Chi-Leong said, hardly anybody bothered to check on the sewage system. All a person would have to do was put on a uniform, possibly one that was a little bit stained; stick some pipe wrenches in his utility belt, climb the ladder attached to the sewage hose, tapping and listening to it from time to time to add plausibility in case, against the odds, anyone happened to look in that direction. And that was it. At the top a nervous but well-paid room steward would be waiting to take the package off the climber’s hands. Then he would be free to climb back down and live his life, five thousand euros richer.

Or, I considered, maybe ten thousand. Or more. Because if the kid could raise the price from two thousand to five, then probably the old man could be pushed a little higher, too.

But I still said no.

It wasn’t that I was unwilling to break a law—assuming that the price was right, and this price wasn’t bad at all. It was just that my personal situation didn’t make it worthwhile. See, if Gerda had still been around she and I could have had a hell of a fine time with a few thousand extra euros. She wasn’t.

The Antica people still were, though.

I clearly remembered what they had done to Abukar Abdu, the Somali from down the hall, for picking up a couple of mosaic tiles to sell to the tourists as souvenirs. This wasn’t a matter of a few tiles. I could barely imagine what the Anticas might do to someone caught trying to smuggle a national treasure out of the country. The Krakow coal mines looked very near.

So I kept on saying no, even when Chi-Leong upped the ante again. He wagged his head at me. “My father, Dr. Basil Chi-Leong, expected a better answer from you, Bradley Sheridan. He will be extremely disappointed at your refusal. As am I.”

He rewrapped the chalice in its purple cloths and made it disappear into his bellybag. At the door he paused. “You have made a very poor decision,” he told me, and was gone.

Things didn’t get better for me. They got worse.

Well, hell, everything else was getting worse, too. Every day the news became another degree more horrific, when I hadn’t thought that was possible. Within a week over eighty thousand people were dead from this Pompeii Flu, all around the world, most of them having done their dying in excruciating pain and horrid disfigurement. Then there were at least another hundred thousand, probably more, presently going through the dying-in-disfigurement process, but with their lungs still pumping air and their hearts chugging along—for the time being, anyway. And then there were the ones who had been infected but hadn’t found out yet.

The statistics didn’t have anything like a firm number for those, but the assortment of guesses all had one thing in common. The low estimate might be any number at all, but the high-end one was always in the millions.

And for me personally …

Well, that wasn’t great, either. The Welsh Bastard had finally begun to notice that my wine vats were still pretty full at the end of my shift, and was getting suspicious. “What the hell’re you doing there, Sheridan? You insulting the customers? Let them catch you pissing in the wine? Torco and Molderman both do twice the business you do, and you got the good location.” That part about the location was certainly untrue, but the heat was on. I temporarily had to cut down on the number of cups I recycled, and that made my cash flow even worse.

And then there was Maury Tesch’s problem.

Before Jiri died Maury had carried the pieces of his nonkosher delicacy away to, I supposed, savor them in private. But then, a week or so after Gerda took off, Maury came knocking at the door, not grinning and not looking at all happy. He was waving something in my face, and I knew without looking what it was. The smell told me everything. “Brad,” he said, voice tight and either seriously pissed off or pretty thoroughly scared, “somebody’s been into my wurst. See? The wrapping’s been torn.”

I pushed his hand away. “For Christ’s sake, Maury, get it out of my face! I didn’t touch it. Maybe Jiri did before he got sick.”

He stood. “Oh, hell,” he said, and stopped there.

It struck me that he was now looking sick himself. “Hey,” I said. “Sit down, why don’t you? Can’t you like send away for more of your—” And then, as the penny dropped, “Oh, Jesus! You think it was your stuff that made him sick?”

He didn’t have to say yes. The way he looked as he sank into the chair said it all. I offered him a cup of tea or some of his own Israeli red, thinking hard. By the time he was finished turning down everything I had to offer I thought I had the answer for him. “There’s nothing to worry about,” I said. “Nobody knew about your stash but you and me and Jiri himself—and Gerda, but she’s not around right now. Jiri could’ve told his wife, maybe. But I don’t think she knew about them. She didn’t say anything. So I don’t think anybody’s going to come after you for his death.”

Maury’s expression had changed again, and this time I couldn’t read it at all. He just sat there, gazing at me—or maybe looking straight through me at God knows what.

Finally he sighed. “You think?” he asked.

I did think that. I told him so.

And then his whole look changed. He managed a kind of a smile. “Oh, Brad, Brad,” he said, “you don’t know what it means to me to have a friend like you.” And many more repetitions of the same sentiment, until at last I pushed him out the door.

I was glad to see him go. As far as I was concerned Maury and his damn sausages were just another annoyance that kept me from concentrating on how much I was hating my present life. He wasn’t even a big pain in the ass, just a little one.

But then the next thing that happened was big, all right, just about big enough for anybody.

12

THE BIG THING

I suppose that that next big thing was going to happen whatever I did. Maybe so. Still, if it hadn’t been for the sky show they gave on the day before at least one thing would have been different. I wouldn’t have been there to see it.

It happened when I was about two hours into my wine selling, the day already hot and my mental state pretty maximally depressed. Then the show began. First the sky overhead just rolled itself back, and then its summery blue turned into icy white. The spotty clouds vanished. When I looked up that blue sky had suddenly become a close-up of something that was unlike sky of any kind and had no business being there. The clouds became floating heads. That giant thing in the air was old Mount Vesuvius itself. In the proper world the mountain should have been squatting peacefully way over against the horizon, where it belonged, but now there it impossibly was, up there in the air and puffing out its plume of white steam as though it had every right to be there.