All the Lives He Led-A Novel (27 page)
COFFEE WITH THE COLONEL
I think I did sleep for a while, and if I had any dreams I’m really glad I don’t remember them. When I woke up Mazzini was back in the chair, looking a lot more alert, and the corporal was serving him coffee.
He saw me sitting up. “I’m waiting for a call,” he said. “Want some coffee? Agnes, give Mr. Sheridan a cup.”
She did. It was black and strong, and very hot. I sipped at it cautiously, waiting to see if the unexpected “mister” meant anything. The professor seemed oddly cheerful. And actually chatty.
“You might remember the Purity Action Society bombings,” he was ruminating, taking a sip of the coffee. “Firebombing drugstores if they sold condoms? Before your time, maybe, but I was the one who infiltrated those buggers, Sheridan. By the time I was through every last one of them was rounded up and in the pen, and I got a commendation. And the Daughters of Manifest Destiny? I don’t guess anybody’s really forgotten about them, have they?” And he was right, nobody had. At least I hadn’t, or anyway not entirely. I did remember my dad complaining to my mom about the Daughters because he said that you couldn’t even kid a waitress in a diner anymore without her calling the cops. Or even bombing your neighborhood bar, if they knew where it was, and that was back before Yellowstone.
My attention wandered. I knew that now he was explaining to me why I shouldn’t judge Piranha Woman too harshly—“born in the slums of Brazil, father took off when she was three, it’s a marvel what she’s made of her life. Joined Security as a trainee, and last year they made her a major!” He paused, moodily refilling his glass. “Half my age,” he sighed. “Oh, there are times when I could wish she was a little less aggressive, but, by and large, it’s best to give her her head. Don’t you agree?”
I didn’t care one way or another. I hadn’t really been listening. But it was simpler to agree. “Sure,” I said.
He nodded. “Especially now,” he reminded me. “That business with the zeps—probably you saw the
Chang Jang
moored down by the refueling station? All of them are ground-moored tonight. Every zep in the world is grounded, while they try to make the air traffic control stations secure enough so it won’t happen again. They claim that job’s done and they’ll let them go tomorrow, but what’s next?”
“You bet,” I said, still not listening. I guess it was the wrong answer because he gave me a funny look, but it didn’t stop him.
And then there was a distant, faint chiming sound—I recognized it, it was the “Ode to Joy” from that old Beethoven symphony, but in this case it was the professor’s opticle ringing for his attention. He blinked the other eye eagerly, listened for a second and then grinned at me. “They’ve accepted my recommendation, Bradley. No charges have been filed against you. You can go home at any time.”
That woke me all the way up. I took a big hit of the coffee, careless of the way it was scalding my mouth. All I could think of to say was, “Really?”
“Yes, really,” he said, gently mocking me. “If you want to wait for a bit I’ll wake up my driver to take you home. Or the door guard will call you a cab. Have you got any money? Wait a minute.” He was fumbling in his wallet, then taking something out of it and stuffing it into my breast pocket. It looked like a fifty.
He was waiting for an answer. I gave him one, sort of. I said, “Well …” But I was stalling, and the reason for that was that pictures were flashing through my mind. They were pictures of Piranha Woman crashing into my room one more time with her little posse of brutes right behind her when they changed their mind back again.
I didn’t want to sit around and wait for that to happen.
But I happened to know that there was a pretty good place to get away to that wasn’t all that distant. If Chi-Leong hadn’t lied to me, the
Chang Jang
should right now be floating over its refueling base no more than a kilometer or two from where I stood. And, thanks to Chi-Leong and his proposal of high pay for some easy smuggling work, I had a pretty good idea of an inconspicuous way of how to get to it.
THE BIGGEST ZEP IN THE WORLD
Unlike every single other thing in my life, escaping from Security went without a hitch. I just told the guard on duty, lurking outside the interrogation room, that I preferred to walk because it was such a nice night. It wasn’t, but he didn’t seem to care. I walked briskly in the general direction of where I lived until I was out of sight, then doubled back toward the refueling station.
And what do you think I was thinking about on that long, lonely walk? That’s not hard to guess. I was thinking about the same thing I had been thinking of all along, with at least that small fraction of my mind that wasn’t taken up with how the dickens I was going to get out of all the messes that were multiplying in my life, namely Gerda. Or, more accurately, those terrible and unbelievable things everybody had been saying about her … or, no, not really unbelievable, were they? Because willy-nilly, like it or not, I was sort of, very tentatively, beginning to almost believe them. I didn’t think the professor would have lied to me about that. And the way I knew that was happening was that I was beginning to wonder just what kind of a man my dear, dear woman had been when a man was what she was.
Compared to dealing with that kind of thinking, being questioned by Security was easy.
Well, it had been easy, as a matter of fact. So easy, in fact, that as we were almost to the dump my reveries about Gerda were interrupted and I began having sudden flashes of discontented reality. It was all too easy! It was almost like some old vid comedy. It didn’t feel like a real escape. What it felt like was some kind of a farce.
But that, I told myself, was silly, and the brisk walk through dark and mostly deserted streets had abolished such worries by the time I was actually standing under that immense airborne whale that was the
Chang Jang.
My luck held. Getting onto the zep was just about as easy as Chi-Leong had promised. The honey truck was still there, sucking out the old liquids to carry off to the settling tanks, while another set of hoses was pumping up the new fluids for the next departure—whenever that might be. There wasn’t a living soul in sight.
The part of the scheme that had been most worrisome to me was climbing the hoses. That had looked like hard labor, but I discovered that there was a ladder hanging off the pipe. Climbing it made me sweat, all right—lifting my own body weight fifty meters wasn’t really easy—but no special skills were required, just the sweat. Well, quite a lot of sweat.
It wasn’t until I had swung myself over the stinking downlink hose that I got my first real scare. I had expected to be alone. I wasn’t. A uniformed crewman was drowsing against a wall of the pump gondola, but when he opened his eyes and saw me there he woke right up. He said something sharp and scared—not in English, and not really addressed to me. Then he turned and bolted, banging a door shut behind him. When I got to the door and opened it again all I saw was an empty short corridor ending in a flight of steps. The crewman was out of sight.
What I didn’t know was where he was running to. To alert the ship’s crew that a stranger had sneaked aboard? There was another possibility, and one I liked better: He just might be the man Chi-Leong had said would be there to receive that old platinum gravy boat. In which case things might not be so bad, because anybody who worked for Chi-Leong would have good reason to keep quiet about the whole matter.
When the man didn’t come right back with armed guards that possibility began to look more likely. I didn’t hear any approaching shouting, either. I began to breathe a little easier.
And then, when I was safely aboard the zep and I had had a chance to look around at what I’d got myself into now, I have to say it almost took my mind off my troubles. I was really impressed.
In my life I had been in some places that I thought were pretty nice, like some of the upscale New York hotels I solicitously helped my drunken tour guide customers to get back to, before I robbed them.
I had been wrong about that, though. Compared to the
Chang Jang
zeppelin, even the fanciest of them was a slum. The zep was an airborne treasure house, beautifully furnished with plenty of good taste and vast amounts of money.
True, not everything on the zep was what it seemed. The oil paintings on the hallway walls weren’t really oil paintings. The statuary wasn’t statuary, either. That wasn’t because the decorators had been trying to save the odd euro by fobbing the passengers off with cheap simulations, though. It was a matter of weight. Virts were made up of photons, and photons weighed a lot less than thick old canvases and massive old marble nymphs and satyrs.
The other thing about that art was that I suddenly realized I could use it to give myself some cover. All I had to do was pause consideringly before every piece of it. I wouldn’t be admiring the artist’s technique, of course. I simply didn’t have any better place to go.
See, I knew that I didn’t look like a zep passenger. What I looked like was a bum who’d just been unexpectedly turned loose by the cops, but that was a matter of attitude more than physical circumstances. After a little cogitation I thought of some help for that.
I had seen, outside some of the stateroom doors, abandoned room-service trays that sat waiting to be collected—or, usefully, for me to add to my camouflage. So I grabbed a cup and saucer from one of them. Thereafter when the occasional person hove into view I at once became both fascinated and thirsty. All they saw of me was my undistinguished back as I faced whatever art object was handy. Sipping from the coffee cup pretty well covered my face, too. Put them all together and I was just another passenger who wasn’t sleeping very well, and so was passing the time until breakfast by wandering the halls and admiring the artworks that lined them.
That wasn’t all that improbable, you know. Under other circumstances, like if I had taken up Chi-Leong’s offer, I might have been doing just that—especially if Gerda had been along to instruct me in what those particular kinds of art were all about. (I turned that thought off as soon as I could.) Art of any kind wasn’t one of my good subjects. Still, they had had some courses in it at NYA&M naturally enough, because they were as totally useless to us as most of the other subjects we were taught. I had taken one or two, but I can’t say they had meant much to me. All the same, I recognized ancient- (and valuable-) looking Japanese scrolls, and paintings—portraits, landscapes, bowls of fruit on a table—that looked like things I had seen on some TV program or other, usually described as having been borrowed from some famous museum. There was one painting of a woman who looked like she had a mild toothache that I was pretty sure came from the Louvre in Paris, and there were several statues in niches that looked like they had been copied from places like the Hermitage in St. Petersburg or New York’s Met.
I wasn’t actually concentrating on art appreciation, of course. All I was doing was to pause in front of almost every piece of art along the hallways, occasionally pretending to sip from my coffee cup.
Well, there was one other thing I was doing—doing a lot of, actually. That was worry. My idle-tourist ruse was not going to be a permanent disguise.
At least I wasn’t at the Giubileo anymore, which meant I was thereby out of the hands of Piranha Woman and her pals. That was good. However, it was just about all there was on the plus side. The list of the bad parts of my situation was a lot longer:
One, somebody a little higher up the food chain than a hall sweeper—say, a ship’s officer—might at any moment show up and ask me who the hell I was. I wouldn’t have any good answer for that.
Two, sooner or later my performance as itinerant art connoisseur was going to wear out, and what was I going to do then?—do about, for instance, sleeping that night? I could see how to manage all the other necessities, at least for a day or two—toilets all over the zep, food 24-7 in at least a dozen restaurants. The zep did not, however, provide casual beds.
Then, three, the hard one: Assuming that I somehow managed to avoid capture until the
Chang Jang
reached some other port—maybe Casablanca, or Malta, or, for all I knew, maybe Trenton, New Jersey—how was I going to get ashore? And where was I going to go when I did? And what was I going to use for money to buy whatever it was I would have to be buying just to stay alive?
Those were hard questions, all right. And all the time there were increasing numbers of people beginning to appear as the early risers passed on their way to breakfast, and I wished all over again that I had never met the late Maury Tesch.
Astonishingly, I managed to stay alive and unimprisoned that way for as much as an hour and a half. Then the whole plan began to fall apart. The problem was this white-uniformed man with stripes on his sleeve who appeared around a corner, striding in my direction and talking on his opticle. His free eye was idly focused toward me.
I didn’t know what to do about him. As a kind of reflex action I gave the man a cursory bob of the head, the way any passenger might to any ship’s officer as they passed in a corridor, raised my hand to my mouth, yawned and turned away, not hurriedly but carefully not doing it too fast, either.
Then I turned the first corner I came to, wishing I could believe he wasn’t going to follow.
I was heading toward the latticed steps that led up and down to other decks, thinking that I might head up toward the dining areas. Unfortunately a quick, and when I thought about it probably ill-advised, glance behind me revealed that the officer had turned after me. He didn’t seem particularly agitated about me, just a little curious, maybe, and with nothing more pressing on his mind than satisfying that curiosity.
I didn’t think it had become quite a hopeless situation, yet. But I couldn’t see any direction it might be heading to other than worse. And then a familiar voice called, “Hey, sweetie, where the hell have you been? We’ve been waiting for you and we’re starving.”