All the Lives He Led-A Novel (28 page)

It was Elfreda Barcowicz.

She was standing, arms-around-waist, waiting for the elevator, and the person whose waist her arm was around was young Eustace Chi-Leong, the gentleman from Singapore who had told me about the informal way to board the zep. When he saw me he winced as though he had just been given a punch in the ribs. He looked irritably at Elfreda, and then, with some comprehension, at me. “Oh,” he said, “right. I see what is happening. So come on, for heaven’s sake. Look, here is the lift.”

It was, and the two of them swept me into it. The door closed on the ship’s officer, who gave us one mildly perplexed glance before turning away, and there we were.

Blessedly there was no one else in the elevator. Chi-Leong was looking annoyed anyway. “What in the hell are you doing here, Mr. Sheridan?” he asked as though it were a personal offense.

Elfreda shook her head at him. “What do you think he’s doing, Eustace? Security picked him up because they thought he had something to do with Tesch getting killed. You knew that because I told you myself. And now he’s getting the hell away from them as fast as he can. Wouldn’t you do the same thing?”

Chi-Leong didn’t answer that right away. I could see that he was thinking in high gear, no doubt ruminating over such questions as: Would I be gentleman enough to avoid implicating him if I was caught? What was the actual risk exposure I would leave him stuck with if I wasn’t? And, most of all, was this going to interfere with whatever new plan he had made to get his precious gravy boat out of Italian jurisdiction?

Then he gave me a scowl, but when he spoke it was to Elfreda. “What then do you wish me to do, Barcowicz? Hide him in some fashion? I do not know how to do that. For you it has not been a problem, as a certain amount of bed-hopping is expected on a cruise ship of this kind, but with another man it is quite a different matter.”

She looked pained. “What I want from you,” she said, sounding just as pained, “is for you not to be any more of a horse’s ass than you absolutely have to. Brad needs to get somewhere where every cop on the corner isn’t looking for him. So think it through now. It will be better for you if he does get away, won’t it? Because how do you know what they’ll make him confess to if he’s caught? So what is there to think about?”

She gave him a short, decisive nod and then informed him what his decision would have to be. “We’ll help him get away, right? And then everybody will be happy.”

20

RUNNING AWAY, FIRST CLASS

A luxury cruise zep, a category of transportation of which
Chang Jang
was definitely a member, has all sorts of entertainments for the paying passenger. (Or even for stowaways like me, as long as we remained uncaught.) To start, there were the heroic-sized swimming pools—two of them, actually, one for fooling around and one to swim laps in for the energetically inclined. There were cold rooms and warm rooms. There was a sauna that was warmer still. There were bingo halls. There were restaurants and bars. There were casinos—and not just one of those, either, in fact not even two of them, but a total of five fully equipped gambling hells, one on each of the
Chang Jang
’s passenger decks. “So you see,” Elfreda murmured in my ear as we passed a room called “Library,” which did indeed have shelves of book disks all around the walls—and also had three apparently taken-down drunk middle-aged male passengers, eyes closed and gently snoring at three of the library’s six carrels. “So you see there’s not really much of a problem—What?” she added, sounding impatient.

I was holding back, peering into the library. “Do you suppose they have recent history coils?” I asked.

“Of course,” she said, sounding peevish. “Why do you want to know?”

I said, “Oh, I wondered.” And let myself be pulled away.

She gave me another of those looks. “Well, it might not be a bad place to hole up. Don’t fall asleep like those guys, though. Sooner or later somebody’s going to wake them up.” In the event, what decided our next move wasn’t actually a thought-out concealment plan. It was just Chi-Leong sulkily complaining that he was hungry. As far as I could see we were quite satisfactorily inconspicuous in the eatery we wound up in—it was called General Lao’s Gumbo and Quesadilla Heaven, but the menu was American Mall Eclectic. I had bacon and eggs and a mound of corned beef hash with plenty of ketchup. Eustace had something called eggs Benedetto, which was basically the eggs Benedict I’d seen people breakfast on in the New York hotels I burgled, only these had chopped black olives sprinkled on their tops. Elfreda had dry toast and black coffee and fresh-squeezed orange juice—by which I mean
fresh
-squeezed, squeezed right at the table by a pretty little Cambodian with a clever little Korean squeezer. And also with a microskirt that I would have paid a lot more attention to if I hadn’t been doing my best to forget about women—or, well, especially about formerly male approximations of women—forever.

As I was chewing, there was a little lurch of our table, startling me. Elfreda gave me a little smile and put her hand momentarily over mine. “We’re taking off,” she said. “I guess they’ve canceled the embargo.”

That sounded like a good guess to me, but it raised a question that I really hadn’t thought about: “Where are we going, exactly?”

I didn’t get a chance to ask it just then, though, because Elfreda had a question of her own—well, the same question, really. “So,” she said socially, chewing away at her toast, “where were you going to run to?”

I gave her an honest answer. “I don’t know. I just wanted to run.”

“Why, Brad? You weren’t actually accused of anything, were you?”

I didn’t really want to discuss it, so I just shrugged. Elfreda sighed, but seemed willing to let it drop, at least for the moment. Eustace wasn’t. “See here, Sheridan,” he said. “If you expect us to help you you must at least be candid when we ask you a question.”

For an answer I glanced pointedly around the noisy room. “I really don’t like talking here,” I said. “Can’t we at least get out of this place?”

They humored me. Well, Elfreda humored me, and Eustace at least recognized the wisdom of getting away from all those ears. We didn’t seem to have a really good place to go to, though. Eustace’s suite was the logical candidate but the maids had been coming in for cleanup as he and Elfreda left. So what then? Another art gallery stroll?

No one came up with a better idea. At least, I reminded myself, I had been fed. The three of us then wandered along a passage lined with tropical flowers, past the third-deck wedding chapel and the medium-intensity gym to the third deck’s casino. That immediately struck me as a good place to hole up. “Can we?” I asked, pointing.

Chi-Leong looked reluctant, but Elfreda sighed consent and he disgruntledly led the way. Once inside, and after being well nudged by Elfreda, Chi-Leong fronted me a roll of quarter-euro coins. Then Elfreda ordered him off to see if their room had been made up yet, so they could light the
“No Molestar”
sign on the door and talk—or, my own idea, get some real sleep. Then she went off to join a few early risers around the one active craps table, where she could keep an eye on me without being obvious about it.

The handiest virt slots were labeled “Futbol.” They did not look a bit like the football game we kids had played in the villages, and I had no idea of the rules. I didn’t really have to. The computers in the machine would pay off every time I won anything, whether I knew I’d won or not.

Actually, I didn’t care whether I won or not. I just sat there, feeding quarter euros into the slot and saw, without really seeing, the tiny virt figures running like crazy around their virt playing field. My mind was full of other things that weren’t virt at all. Maury’s murder. Gerda’s false, but entirely operational, female body, young Chi-Leong’s damn gravy boat, Piranha Woman’s probable pissed-offness at my having got away (and what she was probably trying very hard to do about it), my parents’ upcoming financial ruin, since I wasn’t employed anywhere anymore and wouldn’t any time soon be in a position to resume sending them their pittance.

And again—over and over again—Gerda. It always kept coming back to Gerda. I wanted her back with me, no matter what.

At the same time I really hated her/his/whatever’s lousy guts for being what she/he/it was. And on top of all that, I was more mad at myself than I had ever been before, in what I would have to say was an entire lifetime of never liking myself particularly well anyway. What a
fool
I had been about Gerda! I had never before let any human being of any imaginable gender get this far under my skin. For one time in my life—just one time—I had let myself care more about another person than I did about myself, and look what it got me.

The virt footballers on the screen of my slot suddenly began making little virtual soprano-mousy shrieks of excitement to tell me I was suddenly a winner, and the payoff gate began ka-chinging out euro coins. I counted as they fell into my tray. There were eight hundred and fifty of them.

It was my lucky day—in a sense. Actually I didn’t feel lucky at all.

When Chi-Leong announced that the maids had finished with their room is when I at last got the nap I had been needing. It wasn’t that either Eustace or Elfreda liked that plan better than simply proceeding with the questioning of me. It was only that by then I was getting so close to falling-down exhausted that they didn’t really have much choice. Then, waking, I got a shower, hot, drenching, and long. Finally I even got to put on some clean, and very touristy, clothes that Elfreda had gone out to buy for me in one of the zep’s many boutiques. The shorts were iridescent, the sandals were bright green, and the shirt bore an image of an alp with the legend “Welcome to Beautiful Bavaria.” Nevertheless they all more or less fit me, and I had no other choices anyway. I discovered that the deep pockets of the shorts easily held all the bills I had changed my chips into before I left the casino, too, which made their preposterous color scheme suddenly look less ridiculous in my eyes.

Chi-Leong had treated himself to an outside suite on the
Chang Jang
, but I didn’t think he’d got his money’s worth. There were picture windows, all right, but there wasn’t much to see through them but endless, featureless water. Chugging along at its steady fifty knots, the zep had by then left Pompeii far behind, and a wide stretch of the Tyrrhenian Sea as well. By straining I could catch a glimpse of something a long way to our stern that might have been one of those mountains of southwest Sicily. That was all. Nearer to us there was nothing but some kind of surface cargo ship steaming along across our course, and no other hint of any land anywhere.

When Elfreda came out of the suite’s bedroom wearing shorty pajamas and a recently showered look I asked her, “By the way, where are we going?”

She gave me a confidential smile. “You really don’t know?” When I shook my head she looked dubious but turned on the coffee machine. “You didn’t fool me, Brad. I figured you just ran on impulse all along, right? So, then where would you like to go?” she asked. When I shrugged she gave a little sigh, but then keyed the wall screen to display the cruise itinerary. “Take your pick,” she said amiably.

The list looked like a reasonable way for a multimillionaire to get rid of a month he didn’t need, along with a lot of unnecessary money. Elfreda gave me a chance to memorize it before she asked brightly, “So which one would you prefer?”

Since I had no idea I picked the farthest one, thus giving myself as much time as possible to invent a real plan. “Abu Simbel,” I said. “Up by Lake Nasser.”

That produced a quizzical look from Elfreda and an unamused growl from Chi-Leong. “You did not say he would be with us for eleven days,” he complained.

She turned a frown on him, but it was to me that she spoke. “Really, hon?” she asked. “Abu Simbel? But there’s nothing up there but the dam and some old statues.” I shrugged, attempting to show a fondness for old statues. She persisted, “Isn’t there something before that?”

“Oh, hell,” I said. “As long as I’m on the run one place is as good as another. Tell you what. You pick. Where would you like me to leave the zep?”

“Island of Malta,” Chi-Leong said at once.

Elfreda gave him a far more punitive frown this time. She turned to me. “Where we want you to get off is where you want to be, Brad. If you aren’t comfortable telling us that yet we’ll wait until you are.”

“Well, thanks,” I said, and, “Is there any more coffee?”

Obviously she wanted to continue the discussion. I didn’t, and I settled the matter by turning my back on her to watch the wall screen. Over the next hour I caught up on all the news, which of course was mostly about the Pompeii Flu.

I didn’t have to pretend interest. After a while Elfreda sighed and switched it to the “Caution: May Be Offensive to Some” channel, the basically all-Flu one that recommended a strong stomach and no children in the room.

I would have preferred to stay with the regular news, but I didn’t turn away, although it was hard to take. Lysing is not pretty to look at. Pustulent sores on a little girl’s belly are bad enough, but the tiny baby whose right leg and hip joint had simply rotted off him was more than I cared to see.

I kept my eyes fastened on the scene, though. I had thinking to do.

Elfreda’s curiosity about my choice of destinations had finally triggered an unexpected suspicion. It was possible that some half-formed suspicions that were beginning to float around in my brain had been right and I was caught in the middle of another of those complex, multiperson charades, apparently designed to find out where I would run to if allowed to run.

So perhaps my escape had not been just a bit of amazingly good luck. In fact, as long as I was being guarded (if I was) by Elfreda and Chi-Leong, it wasn’t even an escape.

What made all that more probable still was Elfreda’s behavior. She was watching me intently out of the side of her eye, while doing her best not to look as though she was watching me at all. When she saw that I was looking at her she produced a new subject. “What we all need,” she announced, “is a decent dinner. It better be room service, so we can talk without other people listening in. Shall I order for all of us?”