All the Lives He Led Page 8

  I don’t know how long they would have gone on dissing my wine, and me, but they caught sight of somebody approaching along the via, a dark-skinned youth in a gray slave tunic like my own. “Real or fake?” one of them said to the other. “Beats the hell out of me,” the other said. “Let’s go stick a finger in his eye and find out.”

  I watched them go (their cups left totally empty on the counter), sort of hoping they would try it. The guy they were looking at was named Jamie Hardesty. He came from Springfield, Illinois, and he was as flesh and blood as I was, about twenty kilos more so, actually, and every gram of it pure, hard muscle. The ceramic pots that hung from the yoke across his shoulders would be holding food. Mine, among others.

  The maybe Canadians must have got a better look at him because they veered off and wandered away, just glancing back at him now and then over their shoulders. Jamie set his pots down, rubbing the base of his neck where the yoke had bitten in. While I was filling the eating bowl I kept under the counter he said, “Oh, by the way, Brad. Gerda’s back.”

  Now, that was the kind of news that rolled the clouds away. I guess my subconscious had been processing more, and hornier, thoughts about Gerda Fleming than my conscious was aware of. What I wished I could do was call her up on my pocket screen, right then, but there were too many tourists hanging around.

  I don’t mean I was consciously looking for a special boy-girl relationship with her. I hadn’t been dreaming about the woman—not so that I remembered it when I woke up, anyway. I hadn’t even tried to find out where she’d gone. I just remembered that she was the one I owed the ristorante job to, even if the job hadn’t exactly panned out, and I thought I’d like to say thanks. I couldn’t do it just then, though. First Century slaves didn’t have Twenty-first Century phones.

  So I had put Gerda out of my mind for the moment and I did the job I was being paid to do, gobbling down my food between serving cups of wine. That seemed to entertain the tourists, because, of course, I was eating the “lunch” with my fingers, as any Roman slave would naturally do, and they probably could tell from the look on my face what I thought of it. That day my lunch was a salty, fishy-smelling porridge. That’s to say, it was just another bastardly little surprise from the Welsh Bastard who was my boss, with the fish in the stew right on the margin between kind of all right and really, truly, inedibly spoiled.

  By then there were maybe twenty tourists clustered around my shop, treating themselves to a cup of wine or just enjoying the spectacle of a slave gobbling down his pitiful excuse for a meal. I was glad enough when I’d finished the last foul-tasting fingerful and some of the tourists began to drift away.

  The only ones still dawdling at my bar were a pair of middle-aged men who were having a ferocious low-toned argument in what I supposed was Spanish. They showed no signs of leaving.

  Then the two men exchanged a particularly nasty-sounding couple of sentences and did finally leave, in opposite directions. Now pretty much alone, I was reaching for my phone when something attracted my attention.

  Down the via a quartet of slaves were carrying a litter in my direction. A flash of red hair from the occupant made me think for a moment that it was Gerda inside.

  It wasn’t, though. I caught a glimpse of the face and realized it was some other staffer in the blond wig of a Roman prostitute. Or, I realized on second look, it wasn’t a staffer at all. It wasn’t anyone alive. Palanquin, passengers, and bearer were all simulations.

  I couldn’t always tell the difference, unless maybe it was raining and I noticed the figures of the virts weren’t getting wet. This time there wasn’t any doubt. The side of the litter changed color to a sort of ripple of green and violet. Then it bulged out, and the figures of a young Asian couple jogged right through the palanquin.

  Tourists were always doing that kind of thing, just to show off. Virts were as tenuous as air, and they didn’t care what the customers did to them. What I myself minded, though, was that this couple, once they had crashed their way through the phantom palanquin, hurried right over to my wine bar, where they stopped, giggling to each other, and stood without speaking.

  I remembered I was supposed to be unloading wine on them. “Wine?” I asked. “Vino? Vin? Wein?” That was about as far as I could go with European languages, and didn’t know any of the Asiatic ones that might have been more useful. It didn’t matter. The youngsters did not seem interested in wine in any language. What they seemed to be interested in was a man slowly approaching down the street.

  He was kind of interesting, at that. He was middle-aged and wore a data opticle in his right eye. He was less stylishly dressed than the young people, but the wristscreen on his right arm was set with diamonds and he wore big, jeweled rings on all the fingers of his left hand. He wasn’t alone, either. Eight or ten others of scattered ages followed him. “Good afternoon, sir,” the man said to me, holding his unadorned right hand out for shaking. “I am Dr. Basil Chi-Leong, hello, and you are?”

  “Brad Sheridan,” I said, shaking his hand because I couldn’t see any way out of it. Then I was surprised when this Dr. Basil Chi-Leong didn’t let go of me at once. “Now that we are friends,” the old man said sunnily, “I may ask a favor, I think? To be photographed by my family members with you? If I may? All right? Then thank you,” he said, and threw one skinny arm around my shoulders before I could get out of the way.

  At that point he changed his tone, and his language, and began issuing orders to his family.

  Each one of the adults immediately began snapping pictures of me with one variety or another of camera, still, motion, stereoscopic, and who knew what other kind, as they took a picture with one instrument and then let that one hang from its neck strap as they reached for another. They only stopped when Dr. Chi-Leong raised his hand commandingly. He dropped half a dozen random coins in my meal bowl, still sticky with the remains of my revolting lunch, and said, “That was most enjoyable, Mr. Bradley Sheridan. Allow me to introduce my mother, Madam Katey Chi-Leong, who speaks no English, but is an avid taker of pictures. These others are my three sons and the wives thereof, with grandsons and granddaughters. We are from the Republic of Singapore, perhaps you have visited it? No? That is too bad. But you will not mind if Madam Katey Chi-Leong, my mother, takes some additional pictures of you? And we will each have a cup of your best wine, if you please.”

  They did, too, every damn one of them. Even the children. I thought for a moment of refusing to sell wine to the littlest ones, no more than three or four years old; but the pleasure of selling fifteen asses’ worth of wine in five minutes decided me against asking for IDs.

  Actually, none of the children drank any of the stuff anyway. They carefully held their cups at arm’s length, to avoid spilling them, or perhaps to avoid the smell of their contents, then set them down untouched on the countertop. Even their parents drank very little of the wine. A sip or two was plenty, and then they each made the same face and drank no more.

  I didn’t mind that a bit; there would be more to put back in the vat when they left. What I did mind was that, to get out of the hot sun, all dozen-plus of them had crowded into my tiny shop. It did not have room for such a mob. Three of the little ones had hopped over the counter to share my less congested side, and all three of Dr. Chi-Leong’s sons were sitting on the counter itself.

  The old woman, who had been more or less continuously photographing me, said something peremptory to Dr. Chi-Leong. He nodded deferentially and addressed me again. “You are American, is that not true? And of course, if I may say so without giving offense, Indentured? If that is the case please answer me this question, so that my mother’s interest may be satisfied: Is your income from the Giubileo sufficient for your needs?”

  No tourist had ever asked me that before, and I was caught without a good answer. “Yes” for the sake of my pride? “No” in the hope of a larger tip? “Mind your own business” as the most appropriate?

  I was saved the trouble. An immense black shadow w
as passing over the Via dell’Abbondanza.

  The youngest daughter-in-law, the one who hadn’t been given room in the wineshop and so had been partly out in the sunshine, glanced up, shading her eyes. Then she cried something in that singsong language that I had no hope of understanding. In a moment the shop emptied out of Singaporeans, because they were all photographing the sky.

  Dr. Chi-Leong glanced back at me, pointing upward. “That airship is named the Chang Jang,” he said proudly. “It is given that name after a major river system in the country of our ancestors, which is the country of China. It is this ship which has brought us here from Berlin and Moscow and other tourist places of that sort.”

  By leaning over the counter and craning my neck, I could see what they were looking at. The Chang Jang was one of those giant lighter-than-air cruise zeppelins that turned up in the air of every interesting cruise destination, Pompeii definitely included. The colors this one flew from its tail said that it was a ship of the Cathay Pacifica line. It surely was a monster. I’m not talking here about something like the little air-yachts that rich people sometimes flew, or the blimps that do inter-city transportation. I’m talking large. Zeps in general were usually two kilometers long or so. This one, hanging less than a kilometer above the city wall, was even bigger. It filled the sky from horizon to horizon.

  The old lady spoke, Dr. Chi-Leong said something in agreement, and the family began to move away. The doctor pulled out a roll of euros—actually ink-printed-on-paper euros, I mean—and scattered a selection of them to cover their bill. “We wish you a good-bye, Mr. Bradley Sheridan,” he said over his shoulder. “I hope that we shall meet again.”

  “Sure, fine, thanks,” I called after them. I even meant it. The tips had been impressively good and they’d left at least a liter and a half of wine undrunk in their cups to replenish my vats.

  When I finally got away from the wine vats it didn’t take me long to find Gerda. She was in the refectory, waiting for me. Looking healthy and well rested, too, as she sat by herself at a corner table, picking at some fruit salad the kitchen staff had made up for her. She gave me a welcoming hug, just as though we’d been old pals. Or even in fact old going-to-bed-together pals. “Things all right with you, Brad?” she asked. “Care for some pineapple?”

  I took a piece of the pineapple and sat down before I answered her question. “Fine,” I said. “And you?”

  “Well,” she said, thinking it over, “I guess you’d say I’m really well, Brad, only hungry. Want to eat here? Or shall we go out and get a pizza?”

  There it was, another installment of that old-pals-togetherness. I played it as dealt. “Pizza,” I said, and that’s what we did. We took the long walk around the outside of the Jubilee area to the Porta Marina train station, where all the little food and trinket shops had sprung up. I noticed that somewhere between the refectory and the entrance to the grounds we’d begun to hold hands as we walked. I also noticed—very carefully observed—that Gerda’s earlobes were bare and teeth all uncapped. I knew what that meant. Well, sort of. I knew it meant either that she had no special sexual demands and was not currently in a formal relationship … or else that she didn’t want to advertise her sexual tastes, as most young people did, because she didn’t think it was anyone’s business but her own. Anyway, we ate pizza from the first shop we passed, or at least she did. I didn’t have much appetite. I was too busy looking her over, especially when she was looking the other way, and wondering what she’d been doing on the old Chang Jang. Not to mention that that fishy rice was clumped like a lead weight in my belly.

  And then, when she had finished devouring her pizza, she exploratorily ran her tongue over her teeth a time or two. Unsatisfied with the result, she unwrapped a coat of ruby-red foil from something she pulled out of her bellybag and popped it in her mouth. I guess I was really enjoying watching her chew, and showing it, because she grinned and pulled out another stick of the stuff for me, this one wrapped in green foil. “Cleans your teeth,” she informed me. Maybe it did. That wasn’t why I enjoyed it so much, though. It was the taste of the gum itself, I guess, that really got my little buds tingling, fruity and flowery and, I think most of all, just a tad warmed by the flesh of Gerda Fleming.

  What I was basically doing at that time, you see, was falling in love.

  I didn’t talk much. I mostly just listened while she told me that, boy, those zeppelins were really something, weren’t they? And she’d taken passage in one on the spur of the moment to go to Munich to see her sick old great-aunt Mirabelle, who wasn’t really an actual relative (Gerda explained, though I hadn’t asked) but had been her granddad’s live-in girlfriend when Gerda was little and they’d kept in touch. When she let me know that it was my turn to talk a little she was sympathetic (demonstrated by little hugs) as I told her how boring the wineshop was. Then, when it was getting late I walked her home. She lived in volunteer quarters, a lot nicer than mine, in a building that had once, I think, been the Italian equivalent of a pretty comfortable motel. She invited me in for a drink and we wound up in bed. And by the next day she was my recognized girl. And, short version, kept on being my girl for the next week, and the next, and the next, and, for all those weeks, we never did get around to visiting the Jubilee’s gift shop or Ferris wheel. Never had the time.

  7

  MY GIRL

  Was I surprised that all this happened?

  You bet I was. Not so much by the way I was feeling about Gerda—which really was not totally unlike the way I’d felt about, say, Tina Gundersack, back in the processing camps in North Carolina, right after the evacuation or, for that matter, eight or ten other nubile young girls one time or another. But none of which, when you came right down to it, had ever showed any signs of feeling that way about me. I could only suppose that what was going on was some totally unexpected case of the “L” word.

  You know the word. Love. The word that had never accurately described any relationship of mine before.

  And why was I graced with this new thing now? I couldn’t think of a reason. The old Romans (it had said in one of my readings) explained it pretty well. They thought that love was a kind of lunacy. Probably the old Romans were right. But when Gerda and I did things together it didn’t feel like lunacy. It felt fine.

  So Gerda was a whole new continent for me to explore. For one thing (but not the only thing) I hadn’t had much particularly fine screwing before Gerda came along—the New York teenagers and the Cairo pros were rarely creative, so maybe I wasn’t the best qualified judge. All the same I would have to say that in bed Gerda was—let’s not let the truth scare us off—well, awesome. She knew just where to touch and how to squeeze and when to do the unexpected what. And she was right every time.

  I thought she read my mind.

  Of course, there was really a different explanation, but you couldn’t have convinced me of that at the time.

  So we enjoyed ourselves, we two kids (only Gerda was definitely not a kid) in love (or in something a lot like it, anyway). We would rent a three-wheeler, that is, I would rent one, and go down the coast or up it just to see what we would see. (Usually bars.) She didn’t like to drive, though. She turned the driver’s seat over to me, although she made up for it in criticisms and advice. I didn’t mind. I didn’t mind much of anything. We were having fun. Once or twice I talked her into hiking the lower slopes of Vesuvius, where the virt installers were setting up the projectors for the big sky shows to come. And one time she insisted on taking the chair lift all the way up to the lip of Vesuvius’s deep, hundreds of meters deep, crater. She was the one who talked me into that one. She mentioned that if we wanted we could go down closer on rope ladders, but she didn’t say it as though she was really suggesting we do it. All she said was, “Just look at it, Brad! Isn’t it gorgeous?” I looked. But I didn’t think it was all that interesting, not to mention that it was smoky and hot and generally unpleasant. And I didn’t much like thinking about volcanic eruptions, because Yello
wstone had permanently taken the fun out of that kind of thing for me.

  We took the electric in to Naples a couple of times. Drinks in the Galleria. The compulsory museum visit so Gerda could stand rapt before fifteen or twenty old oil paintings. (I didn’t mind. Gerda looked at the paintings, I looked at Gerda.) Maybe for a decent meal of something like those baby shrimp that they fry head and all in a deep-fry kettle. (The shrimp imported from somewhere along the Dalmatian coast, of course. Nobody in his right mind would eat anything that came out of the Bay of Naples.) We took one weekend in Ischia, soaking in the hot springs and losing as much money as I could afford, and maybe a little more, in the casinos.

  That was where our only identifiable problem was.

  It was kind of a big one, too. I’m talking about money. Gerda, being a volunteer, got to keep all her basic pay and her tips each month, and thus had about ten times the disposable income of an Indentured with a debt to pay off, not to mention a family to support back home, like me. That didn’t signify for her. Gerda was an old-fashioned girl. To her that meant that when a man and a woman went somewhere together it was the man who picked up the check.

  Quaint, right? Not to say sexistly offensive? But there it was.

  On the other hand Gerda was, after all, Gerda.

  The one thing that didn’t cost us an as was about the best part of the summer. All it took to be wonderful was a bed. Or, in the case of my room, a cot, but Gerda’s room had a really big bed and that was a lot better. That was even true of the view. Gerda’s room looked on basically the same things as mine, but as it was up higher it saw a lot more of them. It wasn’t only bigger than mine, it had its own private bathroom, and old-fashioned wicker furniture and carved wooden screens and shelves and shelves of these and those personal possessions. There were, it’s true, a few puzzles, notably a framed photo of a good-looking woman of maybe thirty or thirty-five next to her bed, but she explained that right away. “My cousin Mary Elaine,” she said. “She pretty nearly raised me after my mother got divorced and moved away. I wish Mary was still alive. You’d like her.” Which I had no doubt was true. And Gerda’s place had one big advantage over my own digs. Although Jiri was a roommate who was seldom present, Gerda didn’t have any roommate at all. Except, quite a lot of the time, me.