All the Lives He Led-A Novel (26 page)

17

THE VERY WORST BLOW EVER

I can’t tell you how I felt after that.

Well, I can, sort of. I hurt in places where I didn’t even think I had a pain nerve. I had never before felt anything like this.

The closest I can come was way back when I was a kid. Had to be no more than nine, because that was the year we spent in the transit camps in Knoxville, Tennesee. I had the hots for a twelve-year-old girl named Edna Hollander, and that didn’t work out very well, either.

Actually “hots” may be the wrong word. I wasn’t yearning to have sexual intercourse with her. I didn’t know exactly how that was done, for one thing. But I did, definitely, want her to let me put my hand down the front of her dress so I could caress her bra. Her bra, remember. Not even her naked breast, because that far I did not aspire.

Edna was a little older than me, and a little taller. And, yes, she actually did have breasts, or at least the beginnings of them. And she was alleged to have her mother’s permission to use a little lipstick, powder, and perfume. She did smell definitely better than any of the other girls, and the big thing was that she acted as though she liked me. A couple of times at lunch she gave me part of her ham or tuna salad, so much better than the prefabricated mystery meat the transit camp kitchens provided for the likes of me.

Anyway, I knew where she lived. So sometimes, after whatever miserable stew we were given for supper at the transit camp, I would hike over to her neighborhood—it wasn’t more than a kilometer or so each way—just so I could skulk in the shrubbery to see if I could catch a glimpse of her diving into her pool or rocking herself on their verandah, or sitting, usually with a friend, in the little summer house on their back lawn.

Doing that last part wasn’t always a lot of fun for me, though. All too often the friend she was sitting with was that bastardly high school senior, Randy Doberman. And one night, just after dark, they were talking low-voiced in the summer house, and I was desperate to know if they were just talking, or if they were doing some kind of non-talking activity that I didn’t even want to think about. I thought that, with a little luck, I could sneak up into earshot without being seen. It turned out that I could. I did.

Nobody ever has to tell me what a dumb move that was. I even knew at the time—what was the thing my mother used to say? Eavesdroppers never hear anything good of themselves? I did it anyway, and my mother’s old saying was right.

Most of what I heard at first was from Randy, how he had scored not one but four goals at soccer and, from Edna, how wonderful he was. I couldn’t hear all they said, but what I heard was too much. It went like this:

Randy:—pisses me off when—(inaudible, inaudible)—you can’t tell me you like the little prick.

Edna: (inaudible, inaudible, and how I wished it wasn’t)

Randy: (inaudible, inaudible)

Edna: (sounds of her settling herself closer to Randy) Well, what am I going to do? Reverend Burford says we have to be nice to them and Mom thinks every word Reverend Burford says comes right out of God’s mouth. And anyway—

And from then on it was pretty much inaudible from him, except for some kind of grunting sounds, and pretty much inaudible, inaudible, inaudible from her, until I heard him say, kind of out of breath, “And do you do this for that little prick, too?”

She didn’t answer, and I was pretty sure why. It spoiled my sleep for months, even after we’d moved up to Allentown for the next stop after Knoxville, and what these goddamn Security shits were telling me now in Pompeii was having exactly the same effect on me.

So what I did for the Security shits, I sat there and took it while Piranha Woman had her fun with the situation. She was trying to hurt me, of course. If she wasn’t succeeding that was only because I was already hurt a lot worse than she could possibly do.

So she asked all her questions about our specific sexual practices, and about the physical description of Gerda’s private parts, and about a million or so other things that were absolutely none of her damned business … and, more often or not, were often a lot like the kind of questions one part of my head was throwing at another part. And getting no satisfactory answers, of course. But then, I didn’t have any answers to give Piranha Woman, either.

It was quite a painful hour or so, until the professor said something to a guard, who at once trotted over to Piranha Woman to mutter at her. Looking startled, she turned to the professor: “But there is much more I want to question him about.” He shrugged. “We haven’t even told him about the Flu!” she finished, puzzling me a bit. What was there to tell me about the Flu that the news channels hadn’t already told the world, with pictures?

“All the same, Yvonne,” he said, “let’s end this session, please.”

He had phrased it as a polite request, but it was an order, and one she didn’t like. She pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes, and turned to march out of the room. That appeared to be a cue for the rest of my audience, too, because they almost all followed. Even the professor. He did give me a sort of apologetic shake of the head as he left. I couldn’t guess why.

The only person now in the room with me was a very wide-awake female Security guard. She wasn’t conversational. She was at least human, though, because when I explained a growing problem to her she escorted me, one hand on her gun, to a toilet down the hall. Ordinarily I’m not crazy about having a strange female standing not fifty centimeters away while I’m using a urinal. The need, however, was great.

She even answered me when I asked what time it was. Eighteen hours fifteen, she said, which meant I’d been answering questions or asleep for the short balance of one night, all of the following day, and almost into the next night.

When we got back to the interrogation room she took her position at the door and I sat on the edge of the examination couch, trying not to think about anything anybody had said to me for the last day or two. That didn’t work very well until it occurred to me to stretch out on the couch. Which I did, and the next thing I knew, or didn’t know, was that I was asleep.

That was a successful way of dealing with the questions, but only a temporary one. When I woke up the questions were all still there in my head.

I opened my eyes. Old Professor Mazzini was sitting with his hands clasped and occasionally covering a small yawn—probably because he’d been asleep, but not long enough to completely satisfy his ancient bones. To the guard he said, “You can leave us, Agnes.” To me: “I imagine you’re hungry, Bradley. I brought a few sandwiches.”

He was right. I was hungry enough to consider that they were probably the best sandwiches I’d ever had, too. And when I had finished the professor leaned back, and stared at me, and shook his head. Then he said, “Aw, Bradley, do you have any idea what you’ve got yourself into this time?”

I did not care for his tone. Oddly enough, that was a disappointment. I had come to think of him as—not as a friend, to be sure, but at least as something a lot closer to a human being than any other employee of Security I had ever run across.

Anyway, I didn’t know the answer to his question. The professor knew it himself, though, and, surprisingly, he seemed willing to talk about it without blaming it all on me—another difference between him and the rest of Security.

He hesitated for a moment, then said, “May I ask you a quite personal question?”

I almost laughed out loud. “You mean there’s one that Piranha Woman forgot to ask?”

He didn’t respond to that, but he asked the question anyway. “Tell me, weren’t you ever suspicious that Ms. Fleming was concealing something from you?”

He was getting me pissed off all over again. “Hell, yes. She had plenty of secrets. I knew that. But if you mean about being, what do you call it? transsexual?, no. Never. I don’t care what you say. She was a
woman
, totally. Trust me on this. I’ve checked every damn centimeter of her body, a dozen times over.”

He was shaking his head again, in that damn terrorist-briefing-class way he had. “That doesn’t actually prove anything, Bradley. If you’ve got the money and you know the right doctor and you don’t mind the pain, you can change the sex for anybody in the world, male or female. It’s not quick or easy, of course,” he said, the professorial lecturing tone stronger than ever. “It takes months just to do all the carving up you have to go through, and you can’t do it in a single session because there needs to be a significant amount of healing time between the stages. Then you have to clone some of the parts and grow them to maturity and so on. Then there’s a year or two to flush out the last of the old hormones and bring in the new. But no, Bradley,” he said, with a nod of satisfaction, “you’re wrong. When your Gerda was born she was a boy, all right. Came fully equipped with the penis and the testicles and all the other plumbing you have. She just traded all that stuff in to acquire the new parts that you liked so well. We think she had it done in the Stans because they have some pretty fine facilities there and no government interference. And they don’t keep any records, or at least none they share with us. And there it is.”

What can I say? As far as the medical details were concerned the professor wasn’t telling me anything I hadn’t known about what a plastic surgeon could do, even outside of the Stans—look what they’d done to my Uncle Devious.

Well, yes, there are things I can say. One of them is that my life, already about as bad as I thought it could be, was rapidly getting worse. Invasively worse. I couldn’t think of anything else, not even simple housekeeping things like “my arm’s tired” or “I’m going to need to pee again pretty soon” without ugly, undesired pictures spilling into my mind from the professor’s news. I’m not going to say what those pictures were like. There are a lot of things in my life that I don’t care to talk about, but there are only a few that can actually turn my stomach, and those details were at the top of the list.

Professor Mazzini was silent, occasionally glancing at his book as though he really wished he could get back to reading it. I wished that too. I didn’t want to be told anything else, by anybody, about anything at all.

That was not to be. The professor cleared his throat. “There are a couple of other things,” he informed me. “Major Feliciano felt it would be interesting to get your reaction to some other evidence our people have turned up.”

I said, not intending it to sound like a compliment—and it didn’t, “Your people have been pretty damn busy.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “It’s what we do. Given something to work on, we work fast. So let’s talk about the things we want to ask you.”

He started some long thing about the “biochemical assay” of the late Maury Tesch and the “anomalous antibodies” they’d detected in his blood. Then he said something about how that had “alerted” them to a fuller investigation of Maury’s background, including his work for the Jubilee, and that woke me up.

“Hey,” I said. “Back up. You were suspicious of Maury?”

He looked surprised and maybe disappointed in me for not paying attention. “Oh, very. According to the bio data he had been infected with the Flu but was cured. We didn’t think the cure was spontaneous.”

I was close behind him by then. “You think Maury had some kind of a cure for the Flu? Maybe he was helping to spread it?”

He nodded. “They took those sausage crumbs he’d left in your refrigerator and cultured them, and sure enough they share many genetic markers with the Flu organism. Some of our people think he may have used them as a growth medium for samples of the infectious material itself. Or, more likely, for something sharing genetic markers, but for what purpose no one can say.” He looked self-reproachful. “And it seems likely that from time to time he used his position to contaminate Pompeii’s water system with the organism.”

I was surprised. “Shouldn’t you have tested the water?”

“Of course we did. But, you see, it was Tesch who scheduled the tests.”

He stopped there, I supposed for a little more self-recrimination. I said, “Wait a minute! If he had a cure—That thing he wanted to ask me to do for him but decided he couldn’t—”

He produced a wan smile. A student had come up with the right answer. “Exactly, Bradley. We think that he may have been talking about something involving you and some kind of a cure. Maybe a sample of a vaccine? A biochemical analysis? So now you know why we’re so anxious to know every word he said. If there is something we need to find it. Because people are dying in very large numbers.”

I don’t know if the professor thought that all this explaining would motivate me to do more to help him. Perhaps it might have if I’d had any idea of anything I could have done for him. I didn’t.

He was looking at me expectantly, so I said, “That’s all a little hard to take in. Do you have any more surprises for me?”

“I don’t think so—Well, there is one thing that I’d like to tell you but can’t. It’s very tightly classified. Pity, because I think you’d like to hear it. Might even make you, let’s say, feel better about yourself.”

I looked at him in surprise. If there was anything around that could do that I would have been glad to hear it. He wasn’t going any further, though. Now he stood up. He said, “I need to talk to Major Feliciano again, Bradley. Perhaps you’d like to get a little more rest. I’ll send someone in to keep you company.”

I didn’t answer that, but I did as I was told, climbed back up on the examination table and closed my eyes while he left and another guard came in to keep an eye on me.

What was on my mind was a logical deduction that I didn’t want to make. It seemed clear that Maury was part of a murderous terrorist conspiracy to kill thousands or millions of people. I supposed that explained some of his odd behavior. The question on my mind was, did the same thing explain some of Gerda’s?