All the Lives He Led-A Novel (38 page)

Of course I could have done that. I knew all those answers. Those were the sorts of memories I played back in my mind every night as I was waiting for the pills that Shao-pin gave me to put me to sleep. But I deeply, truly hated being asked such things in front of a crowd. I often refused to answer. Then I found a better way to handle it. Asked about some feature of Gerda’s anatomy, I would pick out a woman in the first row to point to and say, “Probably a lot like hers.”

All this might sound as though things were in some ways going well for me. In an objective sense, maybe they were. Certainly, the money was—what was that word I used—astonishing.

Paragraph one of the contract Shao-pin had written and made the Giubileo sign obligated them to pay my Indenture off and provide me with a €100,000 advance before I spoke a single public word. That was a pretty nice thing for my parents, back in the refugee housing in Staten Island. I gave the money to them. I didn’t check the rate of exchange, but it had to give them at least a million or two of those feeble American dollars—perhaps enough to make up for the time when their screeching, giggling neighbor had banged on their door and summoned them to the newscast on their shared screen so they could see what their rotten son had been doing over in Pompeii.

So I gave the crowds what they had paid for, and then every day I retired to my lonely room—make that rooms, as many as I wanted, and furnished in whatever I wanted—to play the coils again and wish again that I was dead.

Brian was still in his teens by the time he began going after bigger game.

His first grown-up action was in, or against, New York City, to punish the city for its sins, whatever they were. Sixteen-year-old Brian stole a liquefied natural gas tanker truck in New Jersey, drove it halfway across the George Washington Bridge, and abandoned it there for a motorcycle the panicked rider had deserted—having first opened all the valves that released the gas. Then, safely on the New York side, he found a McDonald’s with a good view of the bridge. There he enjoyed an Egg McMuffin and a couple of cups of coffee while he waited for the fairly large number of police who had flocked to the scene to try to figure out a good solution.

They never did.

When the blast did at last blow, it took with it the lives of six firemen, four civilians who had deserted their stuck cars for a better view, and two policemen. It made all the newscasts, too.

After that Gerda kept on running through her long list of other crimes, nearly all of them before my time, or even before I was born. Some of them I had heard of, like the bomb that blew up the New York subway tunnel under the middle of the East River. Others were news to me.

And then, of course, there was the big one. The one that, at least temporarily ended his (her!) terrorist career.

Toronto.

Toronto had happened well before my concern about general world events, but by the time I reached the age of fascination with horrible news I began hearing about it. Gerda showed us the web stories about it.

The Toronto thing happened when four men and one woman, led by the notorious terrorist Brian Bossert, overpowered the crew and drove the domestic heating oil tanker
Jewel of Ipanema
at its maximum speed of twenty-six knots directly onto the Toronto shoreline. Both the inner and outer hulls were breached by the impact. More than fifteen thousand tons of light oil spilled out onto the buildings of the shore and into the lake itself. It was quickly set afire by the collision. All of the terrorists were trapped in the fire (the news stories said) and their bodies were never found. Since Lake Ontario was Toronto’s only source for its domestic water system, the city was immediately paralyzed. Its inhabitants were evacuated, and the city was deserted for more than fifty days until the bulk of the spill was siphoned away and the rest largely dissipated though natural processes. Torontonians bought more than 160,000 copies of a T-shirt that said, “Why Us? It Should Have Been Detroit.”

What the books said was,

They deprived Toronto of its only source of water for weeks. There really isn’t much worse you can do to a city than take its water away. It’s not just that then the people don’t have a drink when they want it. They can’t take a bath, they can’t flush their toilets, they can’t make a cup of tea or boil a pot of potatoes—in short they can’t live. And if it’s bad for the citizens, it’s even worse for the businesses, from car washes to breweries and every other kind of business in between that employs human beings. It is one of the most effective things a hardworking terrorist can do. It doesn’t just mess one city up, it screws up the finances of a whole nation.

Of course, all that would’ve been impossible if they hadn’t had Mary Elaine Whitecrow on their team—someone who was both beautiful enough and smart enough, as well as willing enough, to do a good enough job of seducing a tanker captain to get him to lower his guard a bit. Enough so anyway, for her to sneak their roughnecks onto the ship to take it over. For that purpose, Mary Elaine was just about perfect.

What I hadn’t known was that Mary Elaine Whitecrow was also Brian Bossert’s wife. Somehow the news media had obtained a photograph of her, and that was the part that spoiled my day, because I had seen that photograph before. I had even asked Gerda about it, and she had said it was some aunt or cousin, or something.

I don’t know which was worse, finding that my dear, almost, sort of, wife had once had a really truly dear wife of her own. Or discovering that even when Gerda was mine she kept that once-upon-a-time wife’s picture by her bed.

After the Treaty of Spitzbergen defanged the Stan menace I didn’t think much about those duck-and-cover days at Mme. Printemp’s school for the kids of the wealthy, or that the Stans were where Aunt Carrie’s somadone had come from, but that was history.

The Stans had more formal names than that. If you looked in an atlas, they’d be called Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, but nobody bothered with those names. What those places actually amounted to was nothing but the useless little chunks of real estate that were littering up the maps after that preposterously gigantic old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics did the right thing and took its own life. That was way back, what was it, oh, somewhere toward the last decades of that messy Twentieth Century. Up until that time those Stans had been pretty much a collection of little model Soviet states. It wasn’t that the Stans people really wanted that. It was just that they didn’t have a choice. Crotchety old Joe Stalin was running that part of the world just then and he had a system for refocusing the minds of any Stanian who didn’t share his views. To such people he gave a quick one-way trip to the gulag and a new career in mining gold with their bare hands in the frigid Arctic. The Soviet-Stanian people whom those former dissidents left behind had learned a great moral lesson from this. They learned to do what Uncle Joe wanted, and keep their mouths shut about it.

Of course, once the Soviet Union had gone away the people in charge of the Stans still weren’t the natives. There were some Germans and some Chinese and a lot of ethnic Russians who weren’t getting along with their own governments, but were rich enough or somehow powerful enough to become a ruling class in the Stans. What they wanted most of all was to be left alone. So the Stans were where outsiders weren’t welcome, and where they had retained all those great installations of nuclear and biochemical and everything-else-ical kind of technology that the Soviets had set up in that part of their empire in their (not very successful) attempt to transform those pre-Industrial Revolution Buddhists into technologically brilliant and fanatically atheist imitation Russians.

The other thing about that part of the world in present times was that it also had no extradition treaties. It was where Gerda-Brian’s banks were located. And, what was most important for the fugitive and hurting Brian (because he had picked up some pretty deep burns in the blast), a surgeon, Vassarian Ilyitch Nemirovski, lived there, and he could turn him into something no cop would ever recognize as the desperately wanted terrorist Brian Bossert, namely into a woman.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, from this name alone you could figure out two interesting things about him. From his middle name, which was the version of his father’s that is called a patronymic, that he was an old-fashioned aristocrat, or wanted to be taken for one, and from the last name that that would never happen in Russia because he was a Jew. In the Stans, though, he did just fine. He was one hell of a surgeon. For that reason he had been able to rapidly become rich.

Nemirovski had got his start manufacturing sideshow freaks for some of the African countries that were beginning to get rich but not civilized. Young boys with ears the size of lily pads and penises like a stallion’s, for instance. Nemirovski was known to be able to transform almost any variety of human being into almost any other variety you could think of. All it took was a large allocation of time, and an even larger one of money. Brian, who had taken the precaution of hijacking a Brinks-Renmin truck in Vancouver for getaway money a few weeks before Toronto, possessed enough of both. Though he had arrived in a state of ruination he could be repaired and transformed.

But it took time.

After an unpleasant few days in the beginning—devoted by the surgical staff to trying to stabilize the various damaged parts of their patient in order to keep him alive long enough to begin the transformation—the remains of Brian Bossert had a couple weeks of waiting while tests were made and new cloned parts were begun to be grown to make replacements for glands and nerve clusters and organs that the new Gerda Fleming would need.

But, thank something, I didn’t have to keep on loving it at its very yuckiest. Gerda had no choice but to live through those unbearable months of tortured repair, though blessedly unconscious through some of the worst of them. I did not. I only had to view the bits and pieces Gerda herself had elected to preserve on her coil.

His patients didn’t keep the surgeon terribly busy. He didn’t let them, because he insisted on leaving time for his very active social life.

Which, as a special treat, he sometimes let Gerda share in, at least as a spectator on his TV net, on the occasions when he was entertaining at home. Mostly dinner parties, that was—local political people, visitors from Outside, almost all rich men, but with a decorative frieze of quite good-looking women. A couple of the men showed up so often on the clips Gerda incorporated in that diary-like coil I came to recognize them as regulars, particularly a tall, well-built but elderly Chinese named Bu Deng, who seemed to be to biochemistry what Nevirovski was to cutting and patching the flesh of human beings.

Gerda spent a lot of time in the doctor’s pools and gym, keeping all those new and old muscles working, now that the little shock-stimulators were gone, and most of all in the library.

That was where Gerda had begun to put in longer and longer hours of her time. The professor had warned me that she seemed to have an insatiable appetite for records of the endless list of all the ways man had been violently brutal to other men.

My sweetheart was showing a previously unsuspected thirst for knowledge, perhaps because she had had so little time for education in her previous life. Being, you see, so very busy killing people and blowing things up.

So, you ask, how was it for me?

Oh, quite normal. I hated every minute.

Actually parts of what my love was going through were touching, and sometimes puzzling. One of Nevirovski’s guests looked improbably familiar, and for several weeks I tried to understand how and where I might have encountered this figure from ten thousand kilometers away and nearly thirty years in the past. And then, in another appearance, it turned out that he had studied hydrology, and it all fell into place. Oh, sure! He was my old (dead) buddy, Maury Tesch! Or an earlier edition of him, when he still had a full head of hair. What this young Maury was doing in the Stans was hiding out from international charges of piracy on the high seas. He and the rest of a famous and feared eco-pirate crew had been torpedoing fishing vessels to protect the last of the world’s schools of blue-fin tuna, but their luck had run out. A satellite had located their submarine when it surfaced, and relayed the information to a Chilean pocket battleship cruising nearby. Ten minutes later the pirate submarine had been blown out of the water, killing every one of the crew except for Maury himself. And he didn’t know what to do with himself, now that he no longer had a head pirate to tell him.

What he did have was a lot of money, because what he had been sent to do while the rest of the pirate crew was lobbing over-the-horizon torpedoes at a Chinese factory ship and the Chilean warship had caught them at it was shopping for a new submarine to replace their old Polish one. The new one wasn’t really exactly new. It was serving with the Moroccan navy, but the Moroccan admirals were embarrassed to have a fission-atomic vessel in their fleet when all the other navies in the area were fusion-powered so it was about to be released from the Moroccan navy. They were close to a deal, and he was carrying euro letters of credit for the full purchase price in case the last technicalities got straightened out.

He still had the money. There was no one else alive to claim it.

31

THE SURGEON’S TROPHY HO

The thing about Gerda’s new life was that I thought it should have been a constant humiliation to her. It wasn’t. She seemed to be enjoying it.

There to help her with the enjoying was Nevirovski’s junior surgeon, the one who called himself Rollo. Because the surgeon began letting her appear in public she needed a more elaborate wardrobe. Nevirovski cheerfully paid the bills, Rollo escorted Gerda to the appropriate shops.