Greenhouse Summer (29 page)

MONIQUE CALHOUN HAD NEVER BEFORE HAD the dubious honor of being summoned to Avi Posner’s apartment, but Posner had insisted on vetting the material in a secure venue, not her suite at the Ritz, or the Bread & Circuses office.

The weather had turned strangely humid and hot not only for this time of the year but for any time of the year in Paris. New Orleans in August her grandparents had proclaimed; a steambath in a microwave oven according to others; a secondary sign of the onset of Condition Venus according to those with a vested interest in promoting it.

Whatever was producing this hot foggy overcast, the effect upon Parisian tempers had not been sweet. The cab ride from the Ritz to Rue Dominique had been a curse-punctuated zigzag through horn-blaring traffic, the Place de la Concorde a chaotic bumper-car ride at a not-so-fun fun fair, and by the time Monique reached the address Posner had given her, her nerves were as frayed as the pavement was fried.

The address in question turned out to be one of those perpetually graying apartment houses that all seemed to have been designed by the same architect and thrown up in the same month in the late
nineteenth century, and had formed the backbone of the Parisian housing stock ever since.

There was the usual doorcode and the usual cramped twentieth-century retrofit elevator shoehorned into a wire cage in the center of the stairwell. The name on the mailbox and directory of the fourth-floor apartment, Israel Dupont, seemed like some kind of elusive Mossad joke.

Posner answered the door in a tan short-sleeved shirt and matching jungle shorts. All-too-characteristically of this vintage of Parisian apartment, built with living room windows in the form of doors that opened out onto a balcony, only the bedroom was air-conditioned, the main room making do with the open windows and an overhead fan-cum-water-device known for some arcane reason as a “swamp cooler.”

The “living room” didn’t look as if anyone really lived in it and Monique suspected that the bedroom would be more of the same, though she had no particular interest in finding out. The generic Scandinavian couch, chairs, lamps, and tables had probably been rented en suite. There were no plants, rugs, paintings, or bookcases.

The electronic equipment, however, was not standard. A multiscreen computer console with assorted decks and docking stations. Two video phones, four voice-onlys. A steel rack of stuff Monique didn’t recognize but which she doubted was a fanatic’s state-of-the-art music system. A stand-alone high-rez TV. Scanners. Printers. A portable sat-dish.

Obviously Mossad’s Paris spook shop, not Avi Posner’s cozy bachelor pad. Nor did he offer convivial hospitality.

“What’ve you got?” he said instead when Monique parked herself in one of the faux-Bauhaus sling chairs.

Monique extracted a handful of recording chips from her purse and proffered them to Posner.

“What’s this,” he said dubiously, “the raw recordings?”

“What else did you expect?”

Posner sank down onto the couch, holding up the chips and shaking them at her. “None of these is an edited summary?” he groaned.

“How am I supposed to prepare an edited summary if I don’t have the faintest idea of what I’m editing for?” Monique demanded.

“
Amateurs
,” Posner moaned, rolling his eyes toward the ceiling. “So this is an unedited mess of Marenko table talk?”

Monique nodded.

“You have at least reviewed this material?”

Monique nodded again.

“So perhaps you can at least provide a
verbal
description?”

“Climatech babble. Wine- and vodka-snob babble. White tornado babble. Condition Venus babble. Dirty joke babble. Basically a lot of drunken babble getting less and less coherent as everyone concerned gets more and more blotted.”

Posner seemed to be making an effort not to grind his teeth and not entirely succeeding. “You
did
say you reviewed this material?” he said. “Thoroughly? While actually conscious?”

“I’ve, uh, scanned through it.”

“You’ve . . . scanned . . . through . . . it. . . ?”

“It’s hours and hours of recordings!” Monique snapped irritably. “What was I supposed to do?”

“
What were you supposed to do!
” Posner shouted.

Then he abruptly calmed himself. “I’m sorry,” he said in quite another voice. “This weather must be getting to me. I forget that you are not a professional, nor do you have access to professional-level equipment.” He shrugged. “Not that you’d know what to do with it if you did.”

He got up, went to the computer, Monique trailing behind, sat down, and began loading the chip recordings into its memory.

“Not the latest generation hardware maybe,” Posner told her as they loaded, “but the software’s first-rate.”

By the time Monique had pulled up a chair, the loading process was just about finished.

“Word frequency, level one filter . . .” Posner told the computer.

The computer began muttering electronically to itself.

“What’s it doing?” Monique said.

“Ranking all the words spoken on the recordings by frequency, eliminating the hundred most common words in the language.”

A column of words followed by numbers began scrolling vertically down the screen.

“Stop,” said Posner.

The scrolling halted.

“Word frequency, level three filter.”

The scrolling began again, then stopped.

“Eliminates the five hundred most common,” Posner said. “Let’s see . . .” He thought for a moment. “Word frequency, level four filter, nouns only.”

More scrolling, shorter this time.

“Now we’re getting somewhere. . . . Word frequency, level four filter, proper nouns only . . .”

The list of words was much shorter this time, and all of them were capitalized.

“Word frequency, level four filter, proper nouns only, place-name filter, filter Paris, filter France, filter Siberia, option filter, filter Marenko, filter Ivan, filter Stella . . . top fifty only . . .”

The computer did its thing in less time that it took Posner to issue the command.

“Venus” was at the top of the list, followed by “UNACOCS,” “Larabee,” “Mohammed,” “Bendsten,” “Pereiro,” “Davinda,” “Wright,” “Lao” . . . on down to “Esterhazy,” way at the bottom.

Monique was somewhat piqued to see that she hadn’t made it.

For some reason, Avi Posner did not seem pleased either.

“Shit,” he observed, scowling at the screen, more in agitation than anger.

“Sequence and record. Chronological. Voice only. Follow Davinda. Follow Sri. Follow Sri Davinda.”

More computer noises, then a “sequence and record completed” message on the screen.

“Playback,” said Avi Posner.

“. . . Davinda’s crazy speech even in Zekograd,” said the voice of Stella Marenko.

“. . . Davinda was drunk at big ceremony,” said the voice of Ivan Marenko.

“. . . Davinda’s brilliant in his way . . .” said a male voice that sounded like Paolo Pereiro.

“. . . Davinda a few drinks . . .” said the voice of Ivan Marenko.

“. . . Sri Davinda’s not very sociable, hardly
socialized
these days . . .” said the male voice.

“. . . Sri Davinda!” boomed the voice of Ivan Marenko. “Anyone gives speech dead drunk I want to meet!”

“. . . Sri Davinda’s done reputable work, but gotten involved with some strange people in the past few years . . .” said a female voice Monique couldn’t place.

“. . . Davinda aboard . . .”

“. . . Davinda’s Hindu name, like Lao, da . . . ?”

“. . . Sri Davinda’s climate model on Sunday . . .”

“. . . Davinda sort of disappeared into the woods after that . . .”

“. . . Davinda and Lao, Lao and Davinda, is code, maybe . . .”

“. . . Davinda and those Third Force rumors . . .”

“. . . Davinda’s hardly first-rank, Mrs. Marenko . . .”

“. . . Davinda’s
monk
, or something, da, follower of gurus, Hubbard, Bodhidharma, Lao . . .”

“. . . Sri Davinda so interesting . . . ?”

“. . . Davinda’s a man I like to meet . . .”

“Stop,” said Avi Posner.

For some reason that Monique couldn’t fathom from listening to these seemingly meaningless recordings, Posner had grown more and more agitated as he listened. “What’s the—”

Avi Posner held up a peremptory hand for silence. “Word search, proper noun and/or acronym, multilingual, global, word Lao.”

After about thirty seconds, four entries appeared on the screen:

Lao
—person of Laotian nationality.

Pathet
Lao
—Laotian Communist Party cum guerrilla army of mid-twentieth century, ally of Viet Cong in Vietnam War.

Lao
Tze—putative author of Tao Te Ching, hence legendary founder of Taoism, possibly historical personage.

THE CIRCUS OF DR.
LAO
—twentieth-century fantasy novel by Charles Finney.

Posner shook his head in bewilderment; it seemed to Monique that he was making an effort to avoid the cliché of scratching it.

“Search word Lao,” he said. “Sequence and record. Chronological. Follow Lao. Voice only. Playback.”

“. . . Lao, Mao’s blood brother, da, Kutnik . . . ?”

“. . . Lao, Marenko . . . (laughter)”

“. . . Lao, da . . . ? He is Indian, or Californian mystic . . .”

“. . . Lao, is Chinese Minister of Environment? Haven’t met yet . . .”

“. . . Lao,
Chu Lun
, Ivan . . .”

“. . . Lao and Davinda, Davinda and Lao, is code maybe . . .”

“
Maybe?
” Avi Posner snarled sardonically. “Stop!” he fairly shouted.

He turned off the computer with an angry gesture, stood up looking quite worried, began pacing in small circles.

“What is it?” Monique asked. “What’s the matter?”

Posner stopped pacing. He stared at her. He seemed to be
studying
her. “Do you have a need to know?” he muttered in a tone of voice that seemed to indicate that he wasn’t really asking her, but himself.

“Know what?”

“Can I tell you . . . ?” he muttered. “Can I not . . . ?”

Avi Posner sighed. “Outside,” he said.

“You think
this place
is bugged?”

“Assume that
every
place is bugged, Monique. I believe I’ve told you that.”

“But the only people who could be bugging this apartment are your—”

“I’m bending the contract a bit. I’m doing this on my own authority. There’s no choice. You now have a need to know.”

“Know what?”

“Outside.”

Outside on the narrow balcony, it was hot and muggy and the graying of the sky by an alien atmospheric condition not quite coherent enough to be called cloudy but too high to be called fog not only contributed to a sense of psychic oppression but somehow
did
have Monique wondering uneasily about its possible connection to Condition Venus. Posner went to the iron railing, leaned over, motioned for Monique to do likewise.

“The reason you have a need to know, the reason I’m telling you
this,” he said sotto voce, “is that you must
keep John Sri Davinda away from the Marenkos
.”

“May I ask why?”

“I suppose so, not that they tell
me
everything,” Posner muttered unhappily. “What I
have
had a need to know, according to the client, is that the climate model Davinda is demonstrating on Sunday is their whole raison d’être for the conference.”

“What! How is that possible?”

Avi Posner shrugged. “This they do not believe I have a need to know,” he said. “But this is why they are guarding whatever it is behind that canvas screening in the Grand Palais like an old-fashioned state secret.”