Kicking her legs out over the ocean, the lonely mermaid gazed at the horizon from her perch in the overhanging banyan tree.
The air was absolutely still and filled with the scent of night flowers. Large fruit bats flew purposefully over the sea, heading for their daytime rest. Somewhere a white cockatoo gave a penetrating squawk. A starling made a brief flutter out to sea, then came back again. The rising sun threw up red-gold sparkles from the wavetops and brought a brilliance to the tropical growth that crowned the many islands spread out on the horizon.
The mermaid decided it was time for breakfast. She slipped from her hanging canvas chair and walked out along one of the banyan’s great limbs. The branch swayed lightly under her weight, and her bare feet found sure traction on the rough bark. She looked down to see the deep blue of the channel, distinct from the turquoise of the shallows atop the reefs.
She raised her arms, poised briefly on the limb, the ruddy light of the sun glowing bronze on her bare skin, and then pushed off and dove head-first into the Philippine Sea. She landed with a cool impact and a rush of bubbles.
Her wings unfolded, and she flew away.
***
After her hunt, the mermaid–her name was Michelle–cached her fishing gear in a pile of dead coral above the reef, and then ghosted easily over the sea grass with the rippled sunlight casting patterns on her wings. When she could look up to see the colossal, twisted tangle that was the roots of her banyan tree, she lifted her head from the water and gulped her first breath of air.
The Rock Islands were made of soft limestone coral, and tide and chemical action had eaten away the limestone at sea level, undercutting the stone above. Some of the smaller islands looked like mushrooms, pointed green pinnacles balanced atop thin stems. Michelle’s island was larger and irregularly shaped, but it still had steep limestone walls undercut six meters by the tide, with no obvious way for a person to clamber from the sea to the land. Her banyan perched on the saucer-edge of the island, itself undercut by the sea.
Michelle had arranged a rope elevator from her nest in the tree, just a loop on the end of a long nylon line. She tucked her wings away–they were harder to retract than to deploy, and the gills on the undersides were delicate–and then slipped her feet through the loop. At her verbal command, a hoist mechanism lifted her in silence from the sea to her resting place in the bright green-dappled forest canopy.
She had been an ape once, a siamang, and she felt perfectly at home in the treetops.
During her excursion, she had speared a yellowlip emperor, and this she carried with her in a mesh bag. She filleted the emperor with a blade she kept in her nest, and tossed the rest into the sea, where it became a subject of interest to a school of bait fish. She ate a slice of one fillet raw, enjoying the brilliant flavor, sea and trembling pale flesh together, then cooked the fillets on her small stove, eating one with some rice she’d cooked the previous evening and saving the other for later.
By the time Michelle finished breakfast, the island was alive. Geckoes scurried over the banyan’s bark, and coconut crabs sidled beneath the leaves like touts offering illicit downloads to passing tourists. Out in the deep water, a flock of circling, diving black noddies marked where a school of skipjack tuna was feeding on swarms of bait fish.
It was time for Michelle to begin her day as well. With sure, steady feet, she moved along a rope walkway to the ironwood tree that held her satellite uplink in its crown, straddled a limb, took her deck from the mesh bag she’d roped to the tree, and downloaded her messages.
There were several journalists requesting interviews–the legend of the lonely mermaid was spreading. This pleased her more often than not, but she didn’t answer any of the queries. There was a message from Darton, which she decided to savor for a while before opening. And then she saw a note from Dr. Davout, and opened it at once.
Davout was, roughly, twelve times her age. He’d actually been carried for nine months in his mother’s womb, not created from scratch in a nanobed like almost everyone else she knew. He had a sib who was a famous astronaut, a McEldowny Prize for his Lavoisier and His Age, and a red-haired wife who was nearly as well-known as he was. A couple of years ago, Michelle had attended a series of his lectures at the College of Mystery, and been interested despite her specialty being, strictly speaking, biology.
He had shaved off the little goatee he’d worn when she’d last seen him, which Michelle considered a good thing. "I have a research project for you, if you’re free," the recording said. "It shouldn’t take too much effort."
Michelle contacted him at once. He was a rich old bastard with a thousand years of tenure and no notion of what it was to be young in these times, and he’d pay her whatever outrageous fee she asked.
Her material needs at the moment were few, but she wouldn’t stay on this island forever.
Davout answered right away. Behind him, working at her own console, Michelle could see his red-haired wife Katrin.
"Michelle!" Davout said, loudly enough for Katrin to know who’d called without turning around. "Good!" He hesitated, and then his fingers formed the mudra for <concern>. "I understand you’ve suffered a loss," he said.
"Yes," she said, her answer delayed by a second’s satellite lag.
"And the young man–?"
"Doesn’t remember."
Which was not exactly a lie, the point being what was remembered.
Davout’s fingers were still fixed in <concern>. "Are you all right?" he asked.
Her own fingers formed an equivocal answer. "I’m getting better." Which was probably true.
"I see you’re not an ape any more."
"I decided to go the mermaid route. New perspectives, all that." And welcome isolation.
"Is there any way we can make things easier for you?"
She put on a hopeful expression. "You said something about a job?"
"Yes." He seemed relieved not to have to probe further–he’d had a real-death in his own family, Michelle remembered, a chance-in-a-billion thing, and perhaps he didn’t want to relive any part of that.
"I’m working on a biography of Terzian," Davout said.
" . . . And his Age?" Michelle finished.
"And his Legacy." Davout smiled. "There’s a three-week period in his life where he–well, he drops right off the map. I’d like to find out where he went–and who he was with, if anyone."
Michelle was impressed. Even in comparatively unsophisticated times such as that inhabited by Jonathan Terzian, it was difficult for people to disappear.
"It’s a critical time for him," Davout went on. "He’d lost his job at Tulane, his wife had just died–realdeath, remember–and if he decided he simply wanted to get lost, he would have all my sympathies." He raised a hand as if to tug at the chin-whiskers that were no longer there, made a vague pawing gesture, then dropped the hand. "But my problem is that when he resurfaces, everything’s changed for him. In June, he delivered an undistinguished paper at the Athenai conference in Paris, then vanished. When he surfaced in Venice in mid-July, he didn’t deliver the paper he was scheduled to read, instead he delivered the first version of his Cornucopia Theory."
Michelle’s fingers formed the mudra <highly impressed>. "How have you tried to locate him?"
"Credit card records–they end on June 17, when he buys a lot of euros at American Express in Paris. After that, he must have paid for everything with cash."
"He really did try to get lost, didn’t he?" Michelle pulled up one bare leg and rested her chin on it. "Did you try passport records?"
<No luck.> "But if he stayed in the European Community he wouldn’t have had to present a passport when crossing a border."
"Cash machines?"
"Not till after he arrived in Venice, just a couple of days prior to the conference."
The mermaid thought about it for a moment, then smiled. "I guess you need me, all right."
<I concur> Davout flashed solemnly. "How much would it cost me?"
Michelle pretended to consider the question for a moment, then named an outrageous sum.
Davout frowned. "Sounds all right," he said.
Inwardly, Michelle rejoiced. Outwardly, she leaned toward the camera lens and looked businesslike. "I’ll get busy, then."
Davout looked grateful. "You’ll be able to get on it right away?"
"Certainly. What I need you to do is send me pictures of Terzian, from as many different angles as possible, especially from around that period of time."
"I have them ready."
"Send away."
An eyeblink later, the pictures were in Michelle’s deck. <Thanks> she flashed. "I’ll let you know as soon as I find anything."
At university, Michelle had discovered that she was very good at research, and it had become a profitable sideline for her. People–usually people connected with academe in one way or another–hired her to do the duller bits of their own jobs, finding documents or references, or, in this case, three missing weeks out of a person’s life. It was almost always work they could do themselves, but Michelle was simply better at research than most people, and she was considered worth the extra expense. Michelle herself usually enjoyed the work–it gave her interesting sidelights on fields about which she knew little, and provided a welcome break from routine.
Plus, this particular job required not so much a researcher as an artist, and Michelle was very good at this particular art.
Michelle looked through the pictures, most scanned from old photographs. Davout had selected well: Terzian’s face or profile was clear in every picture. Most of the pictures showed him young, in his twenties, and the ones that showed him older were of high quality, or showed parts of the body that would be crucial to the biometric scan, like his hands or his ears.
The mermaid paused for a moment to look at one of the old photos: Terzian smiling with his arm around a tall, long-legged woman with a wide mouth and dark, bobbed hair, presumably the wife who had died. Behind them was a Louis Quinze table with a blaze of gladiolas in a cloisonné vase, and, above the table, a large portrait of a stately-looking horse in a heavy gilded frame. Beneath the table were stowed–temporarily, Michelle assumed–a dozen or so trophies, which to judge from the little golden figures balanced atop them were awarded either for gymnastics or martial arts. The opulent setting seemed a little at odds with the young, informally dressed couple: she wore a flowery tropical shirt tucked into khakis, and Terzian was dressed in a tank top and shorts. There was a sense that the photographer had caught them almost in motion, as if they’d paused for the picture en route from one place to another.
Nice shoulders, Michelle thought. Big hands, well-shaped muscular legs. She hadn’t ever thought of Terzian as young, or large, or strong, but he had a genuine, powerful physical presence that came across even in the old, casual photographs. He looked more like a football player than a famous thinker.
Michelle called up her character-recognition software and fed in all the pictures, then checked the software’s work, something she was reasonably certain her employer would never have done if he’d been doing this job himself. Most people using this kind of canned software didn’t realize how the program could be fooled, particularly when used with old media, scanned film prints heavy with grain and primitive digital images scanned by machines that simply weren’t very intelligent. In the end, Michelle and the software between them managed an excellent job of mapping Terzian’s body and calibrating its precise ratios: the distance between the eyes, the length of nose and curve of lip, the distinct shape of the ears, the length of limb and trunk. Other men might share some of these biometric ratios, but none would share them all.
The mermaid downloaded the data into her specialized research spiders, and sent them forth into the electronic world.
A staggering amount of the trivial past existed there, and nowhere else. People had uploaded pictures, diaries, commentary, and video; they’d digitized old home movies, complete with the garish, deteriorating colors of the old film stock; they’d scanned in family trees, postcards, wedding lists, drawings, political screeds, and images of handwritten letters. Long, dull hours of security video. Whatever had meant something to someone, at some time, had been turned into electrons and made available to the universe at large.
A surprising amount of this stuff had survived the Lightspeed War–none of it had seemed worth targeting, or, if trashed, had been reloaded from backups.
What all this meant was that Terzian was somewhere in there. Wherever Terzian had gone in his weeks of absence–Paris, Dalmatia, or Thule–there would have been someone with a camera. In stills of children eating ice cream in front of Notre Dame, or moving through the video of buskers playing saxophone on the Pont des Artistes, there would be a figure in the background, and that figure would be Terzian. Terzian might be found lying on a beach in Corfu, reflected in a bar mirror in Gdynia, or negotiating with a prostitute in Hamburg’s St. Pauli district–Michelle had found targets in exactly those places during the course of her other searches.
Michelle sent her software forth to find Terzian, then lifted her arms above her head and stretched–stretched fiercely, thrusting out her bare feet and curling the toes, the muscles trembling with tension, her mouth yawned in a silent shriek.
Then she leaned over her deck again, and called up the message from Darton, the message she’d saved till last.
"I don’t understand," he said. "Why won’t you talk to me? I love you!"
His brown eyes were a little wild.
"Don’t you understand?" he cried. "I’m not dead! I’m not really dead!"
Michelle hovered three or four meters below the surface of Zigzag Lake, gazing upward at the inverted bowl of the heavens, the brilliant blue of the Pacific sky surrounded by the dark, shadowy towers of mangrove. Something caught her eye, something black and falling, like a bullet: and then there was a splash and a boil of bubbles, and the daggerlike bill of a collared kingfisher speared a blue-eyed apogonid that had been hovering over a bright red coral head. The kingfisher flashed its pale underside as it stroked to the surface, its wings doing efficient double duty as fins, and then there was a flurry of wings and feet and bubbles and the kingfisher was airborne again.
Michelle floated up and over the barrel-shaped coral head, then over a pair of giant clams, each over a meter long. The clams drew shut as Michelle slid across them, withdrawing the huge siphons as thick as her wrist. The fleshy lips that overhung the scalloped edges of the shells were a riot of colors: purples, blues, greens, and reds interwoven in a eye-boggling pattern.
Carefully drawing in her gills so their surfaces wouldn’t be inflamed by coral stings, she kicked up her feet and dove beneath the mangrove roots into the narrow tunnel that connected Zigzag Lake with the sea.
Of the three hundred or so Rock Islands, seventy or thereabouts had marine lakes. The islands were made of coral limestone and porous to one degree or another: some lakes were connected to the ocean through tunnels and caves, and others through seepage. Many of the lakes contained forms of life unique in all the world, evolved distinctly from their remote ancestors: even now, after all this time, new species were being described.
During the months Michelle had spent in the islands, she thought she’d discovered two undescribed species: a variation on the Entacmaea medusivora white anemone that was patterned strangely with scarlet and a cobalt-blue; and a nudibranch, deep violet with yellow polka dots, that had undulated past her one night on the reef, flapping like a tea towel in a strong wind as a seven-knot tidal current tore it along. The nudi and samples of the anemone had been sent to the appropriate authorities, and perhaps in time Michelle would be immortalized by having a Latinate version of her name appended to the scientific description of the two marine animals.
The tunnel was about fifteen meters long, and had a few narrow twists where Michelle had to pull her wings in close to her sides and maneuver by the merest fluttering of their edges. The tunnel turned up, and brightened with the sun; the mermaid extended her wings and flew over brilliant pink soft corals toward the light.
The sea was brilliantly lit, unlike the gloomy marine lake surrounded by tall cliffs, mangroves, and shadow, and for a moment Michelle’s sun-dazzled eyes failed to see the boat bobbing on the tide. She stopped short, her wings cupping to brake her motion, and then she recognized the boat’s distinctive paint job, a bright red meant to imitate the natural oil of the cheritem fruit.
Michelle prudently rose to the surface a safe distance away–Torbiong might be fishing, and sometimes he did it with a spear. The old man saw her, and stood to give a wave before Michelle could unblock her trachea and draw air into her lungs to give a hail.
"I brought you supplies," he said.
"Thanks." Michelle said as she wiped a rain of sea water from her face.
Torbiong was over two hundred years old, and Paramount Chief of Koror, the capital forty minutes away by boat. He was small and wiry and black-haired, and had a broad-nosed, strong-chinned, unlined face. He had traveled over the world and off it while young, but returned to Belau as he aged. His duties as chief were mostly ceremonial, but counted for tax purposes; he had money from hotels and restaurants that his ancestors had built and that others managed for him, and he spent most of his time visiting his neighbors, gossiping, and fishing. He had befriended Darton and Michelle when they’d first come to Belau, and helped them in securing the permissions for their researches on the Rock Islands. A few months back, after Darton died, Torbiong had agreed to bring supplies to Michelle in exchange for the occasional fish.
His boat was ten meters long and featured a waterproof canopy amidships made from interwoven pandanas leaves. Over the scarlet faux-cheritem paint were zigzags, crosses, and stripes in the brilliant yellow of the ginger plant. The ends of the thwarts were decorated with grotesque carved faces, and dozens of white cowrie shells were glued to the gunwales. Wooden statues of the kingfisher bird sat on the prow and stern.
Thrusting above the pandanas canopy were antennae, flagpoles, deep-sea fishing rods, fish spears, radar, and a satellite uplink. Below the canopy, where Torbiong could command the boat from an elaborately carved throne of breadfruit-tree wood, were the engine and rudder controls, radio, audio, and video sets, a collection of large audio speakers, a depth finder, a satellite navigation relay, and radar. Attached to the uprights that supported the canopy were whistles tuned to make an eerie, discordant wailing noise when the boat was at speed.
Torbiong was fond of discordant wailing noises. As Michelle swam closer, she heard the driving, screeching electronic music that Torbiong loved trickling from the earpieces of his headset–he normally howled it out of speakers, but when sitting still he didn’t want to scare the fish. At night, she could hear Torbiong for miles, as he raced over the darkened sea blasted out of his skull on betel-nut juice with his music thundering and the whistles shrieking.
He removed the headset, releasing a brief audio onslaught before switching off his sound system.
"You’re going to make yourself deaf," Michelle said.
Torbiong grinned. "Love that music. Gets the blood moving."
Michelle floated to the boat and put a hand on the gunwale between a pair of cowries.
"I saw that boy of yours on the news," Torbiong said. "He’s making you famous."
"I don’t want to be famous."
"He doesn’t understand why you don’t talk to him."
"He’s dead," Michelle said.
Torbiong made a spreading gesture with his hands. "That’s a matter of opinion."
"Watch your head," said Michelle.
Torbiong ducked as a gust threatened to bring him into contact with a pitcher plant that drooped over the edge of the island’s overhang. Torbiong evaded the plant and then stepped to the bow to haul in his mooring line before the boat’s canopy got caught beneath the overhang,
Michelle submerged and swam till she reached her banyan tree, then surfaced and called down her rope elevator. By the time Torbiong’s boat hissed up to her, she’d folded away her gills and wings and was sitting in the sling, kicking her legs over the water.
Torbiong handed her a bag of supplies: some rice, tea, salt, vegetables, and fruit. For the last several weeks Michelle had experienced a craving for blueberries, which didn’t grow here, and Torbiong had included a large package fresh off the shuttle, and a small bottle of cream to go with them. Michelle thanked him.
"Most tourists want corn chips or something," Torbiong said pointedly.
"I’m not a tourist." Michelle said. "I’m sorry I don’t have any fish to swap–I’ve been hunting smaller game." She held out the specimen bag, still dripping sea water.
Torbiong gestured toward the cooler built into the back of his boat. "I got some chai and a chersuuch today," he said, using the local names for barracuda and mahi mahi.
"Good fishing."
"Trolling." With a shrug. He looked up at her, a quizzical look on his face. "I’ve got some calls from reporters," he said, and then his betel-stained smile broke out. "I always make sure to send them tourist literature."
"I’m sure they enjoy reading it."
Torbiong’s grin widened. "You get lonely, now," he said, "you come visit the family. We’ll give you a home-cooked meal."
She smiled. "Thanks."
They said their farewells and Torbiong’s boat hissed away on its jets, the whistles building to an eerie, spine-shivering chord. Michelle rose into the trees and stashed her specimens and groceries. With a bowl of blueberries and cream, Michelle crossed the rope walkway to her deck, and checked the progress of her search spiders.
There were pointers to a swarm of articles about the death of Terzian’s wife, and Michelle wished she’d given her spiders clearer instructions about dates.
The spiders had come up with three pictures. One was a not-very-well focused tourist video from July 10, showing a man standing in front of the Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence. A statue of Dante, also not in focus, gloomed down at him from beneath thick-bellied rain clouds. As the camera panned across him, he stood with his back to the camera, but turned to the right, one leg turned out as he scowled down at the ground–the profile was a little smeared, but the big, broad-shouldered body seemed right. The software reckoned that there was a 78 percent chance that the man was Terzian.
Michelle got busy refining the image, and after a few passes of the software, decided the chances of the figure being Terzian were more on the order of 95 percent.
So maybe Terzian had gone on a Grand Tour of European cultural sites. He didn’t look happy in the video, but then the day was rainy and Terzian didn’t have an umbrella.
And his wife had died, of course.
Now that Michelle had a date and a place she refined the instructions from her search spiders to seek out images from Florence a week either way from July 3, and then expand the search from there, first all Tuscany, then all Italy.
If Terzian was doing tourist sites, then she surely had him nailed.
The next two hits, from her earlier research spiders, were duds. The software gave a less than 50 percent chance of Terzian’s being in Lisbon or Cape Sounion, and refinements of the image reduced the chance to something near zero.
Then the next video popped up, with a time stamp right there in the image–Paris, June 26, 13:41:44 hours, just a day before Terzian bought a bankroll of Euros and vanished.
<Bingo!> Michelle’s fingers formed.
The first thing Michelle saw was Terzian walking out of the frame–no doubt this time that it was him. He was looking over his shoulder at a small crowd of people. There was a dark-haired woman huddled on his arm, her face turned away from the camera. Michelle’s heart warmed at the thought of the lonely widower Terzian having an affair in the City of Love.
Then she followed Terzian’s gaze to see what had so drawn his attention. A dead man stretched out on the pavement, surrounded by hapless bystanders.
And then, as the scene slowly settled into her astonished mind, the video sang at her in the piping voice of Pan.
Terzian looked at his audience as anger raged in his backbrain. A wooden chair creaked, and the sound spurred Terzian to wonder how long the silence had gone on. Even the Slovenian woman who had been drowsing realized that something had changed, and blinked herself to alertness.
"I’m sorry," he said in French. "But my wife just died, and I don’t feel like playing this game any more."
His silent audience watched as he gathered his papers, put them in his case, and left the lecture room, his feet making sharp, murderous sounds on the wooden floor.
Yet up to that point his paper had been going all right. He’d been uncertain about commenting on Baudrillard in Baudrillard’s own country, and in Baudrillard’s own language, a cheery compare-and-contrast exercise between Baudrillard’s "the self does not exist" and Rorty’s "I don’t care," the stereotypical French and American answers to modern life. There had been seven in his audience, perched on creaking wooden chairs, and none of them had gone to sleep, or walked out, or condemned him for his audacity.
Yet, as he looked at his audience and read on, Terzian had felt the anger growing, spawned by the sensation of his own uselessness. Here he was, in the City of Light, its every cobblestone a monument to European civilization, and he was in a dreary lecture hall on the Left Bank, reading to his audience of seven from a paper that was nothing more than a footnote, and a footnote to a footnote at that. To come to the land of cogito ergo sum and to answer, I don’t care?
I came to Paris for this? he thought. To read this drivel? I paid for the privilege of doing this?
I do care, he thought as his feet turned toward the Seine. Desiderio, ergo sum, if he had his Latin right. I am in pain, and therefore I do exist.
He ended in a Norman restaurant on the Ile de la Cité, with lunch as his excuse and the thought of getting hopelessly drunk not far from his thoughts. He had absolutely nothing to do until August, after which he would return to the States and collect his belongings from the servants’ quarters of the house on Esplanade, and then he would go about looking for a job.
He wasn’t certain whether he would be more depressed by finding a job or by not finding one.
You are alive, he told himself. You are alive and in Paris with the whole summer ahead of you, and you’re eating the cuisine of Normandy in the Place Dauphine. And if that isn’t a command to be joyful, what is?
It was then that the Peruvian band began to play. Terzian looked up from his plate in weary surprise.
When Terzian had been a child his parents–both university professors–had first taken him to Europe, and he’d seen then that every European city had its own Peruvian or Bolivian street band, Indians in black bowler hats and colorful blankets crouched in some public place, gazing with impassive brown eyes from over their guitars and reed flutes.
Now, a couple of decades later, the musicians were still here, though they’d exchanged the blankets and bowler hats for European styles, and their presentation had grown more slick. Now they had amps, and cassettes and CDs for sale. Now they had congregated in the triangular Place Dauphine, overshadowed by the neo-classical mass of the Palais de Justice, and commenced a Latin-flavored medley of old Abba songs.
Maybe, after Terzian finished his veal in calvados sauce, he’d go up to the band and kick in their guitars.
The breeze flapped the canvas overhead. Terzian looked at his empty plate. The food had been excellent, but he could barely remember tasting it.
Anger still roiled beneath his thoughts. And–for God’s sake–was that band now playing Oasis? Those chords were beginning to sound suspiciously like "Wonderwall." "Wonderwall" on Spanish guitars, reed flutes, and a mandolin!
Terzian had nearly decided to call for a bottle of cognac and stay here all afternoon, but not with that noise in the park. He put some euros on the table, anchoring the bills with a saucer against the fresh spring breeze that rattled the green canvas canopy over his head. He was stepping through the restaurant’s little wrought-iron gate to the sidewalk when the scuffle caught his attention.
The man falling into the street, his face pinched with pain. The hands of the three men on either side who were, seemingly, unable to keep their friend erect.
Idiots, Terzian thought, fury blazing in him.
There was a sudden shrill of tires, of an auto horn.
Papers streamed in the wind as they spilled from a briefcase.
And over it all came the amped sound of pan pipes from the Peruvian band. Wonderwall.
Terzian watched in exasperated surprise as the three men sprang after the papers. He took a step toward the fallen man–someone had to take charge here. The fallen man’s hair had spilled in a shock over his forehead and he’d curled on his side, his face still screwed up in pain.
The pan pipes played on, one distinct hollow shriek after another.
Terzian stopped with one foot still on the sidewalk and looked around at faces that all registered the same sense of shock. Was there a doctor here? he wondered. A French doctor? All his French seemed to have just drained from his head. Even such simple questions as Are you all right? and How are you feeling? seemed beyond him now. The first aid course he’d taken in his Kenpo school was ages ago.
Unnaturally pale, the fallen man’s face relaxed. The wind floated his shock of thinning dark hair over his face. In the park, Terzian saw a man in a baseball cap panning a video camera, and his anger suddenly blazed up again at the fatuous uselessness of the tourist, the uselessness that mirrored his own.
Suddenly there was a crowd around the casualty, people coming out of stopped cars, off the sidewalk. Down the street, Terzian saw the distinctive flat-topped kepis of a pair of policemen bobbing toward him from the direction of the Palais de Justice, and felt a surge of relief. Someone more capable than this lot would deal with this now.
He began, hesitantly, to step away. And then his arm was seized by a pair of hands and he looked in surprise at the woman who had just huddled her face into his shoulder, cinnamon-dark skin and eyes invisible beneath wraparound shades.
"Please," she said in English a bit too musical to be American. "Take me out of here."
The sound of the reed pipes followed them as they made their escape.
***
He walked her past the statue of the Vert Galant himself, good old lecherous Henri IV, and onto the Pont Neuf. To the left, across the Seine, the Louvre glowed in mellow colors beyond a screen of plane trees.
Traffic roared by, a stampede of steel unleashed by a green light. Unfocused anger blazed in his mind. He didn’t want this woman attached to him, and he suspected she was running some kind of scam. The gym bag she wore on a strap over one shoulder kept banging him on the ass. Surreptitiously, he slid his hand into his right front trouser pocket to make sure his money was still there.
Wonderwall, he thought. Christ.
He supposed he should offer some kind of civilized comment, just in case the woman was genuinely distressed.
"I suppose he’ll be all right," he said, half-barking the words in his annoyance and anger.
The woman’s face was still half-buried in his shoulder. "He’s dead," she murmured into his jacket. "Couldn’t you tell?"
For Terzian, death had never occurred under the sky, but shut away, in hospice rooms with crisp sheets and warm colors and the scent of disinfectant. In an explosion of tumors and wasting limbs and endless pain masked only in part by morphia.
He thought of the man’s pale face, the sudden relaxation.
Yes, he thought, death came with a sigh.
Reflex kept him talking. "The police were coming," he said. "They’ll–they’ll call an ambulance or something."
"I only hope they catch the bastards who did it," she said.
Terzian’s heart gave a jolt as he recalled the three men who let the victim fall, and then dashed through the square for his papers. For some reason, all he could remember about them were their black-laced boots, with thick soles.
"Who were they?" he asked blankly.
The woman’s shades slid down her nose, and Terzian saw startling green eyes narrowed to murderous slits. "I suppose they think of themselves as cops," she said.
Terzian parked his companion in a café near Les Halles, within sight of the dome of the Bourse. She insisted on sitting indoors, not on the sidewalk, and on facing the front door so that she could scan whoever came in. She put her gym bag, with its white Nike swoosh, on the floor between the table legs and the wall, but Terzian noticed she kept its shoulder strap in her lap, as if she might have to bolt at any moment.
Terzian kept his wedding ring within her sight. He wanted her to see it; it might make things simpler.
Her hands were trembling. Terzian ordered coffee for them both. "No," she said suddenly. "I want ice cream."
Terzian studied her as she turned to the waiter and ordered in French. She was around his own age, twenty-nine. There was no question that she was a mixture of races, but which races? The flat nose could be African or Asian or Polynesian, and Polynesia was again confirmed by the black, thick brows. Her smooth brown complexion could be from anywhere but Europe, but her pale green eyes were nothing but European. Her broad, sensitive mouth suggested Nubia. The black ringlets yanked into a knot behind her head could be African or East Indian, or, for that matter, French. The result was too striking to be beautiful–and also too striking, Terzian thought, to belong to a successful criminal. Those looks could be too easily identified.
The waiter left. She turned her wide eyes toward Terzian, and seemed faintly surprised that he was still there.
"My name’s Jonathan," he said.
"I’m," hesitating, "Stephanie."
"Really?" Terzian let his skepticism show.
"Yes." She nodded, reaching in a pocket for cigarettes. "Why would I lie? It doesn’t matter if you know my real name or not."
"Then you’d better give me the whole thing."
She held her cigarette upward, at an angle, and enunciated clearly. "Stephanie América Pais e Silva."
"America?"
Striking a match. "It’s a perfectly ordinary Portuguese name."
He looked at her. "But you’re not Portuguese."
"I carry a Portuguese passport."
Terzian bit back the comment, I’m sure you do.
Instead he said, "Did you know the man who was killed?"
Stephanie nodded. The drags she took off her cigarette did not ease the tremor in her hands.
"Did you know him well?"
"Not very." She dragged in smoke again, then let the smoke out as she spoke.
"He was a colleague. A biochemist."
Surprise silenced Terzian. Stephanie tipped ash into the Cinzano ashtray, but her nervousness made her miss, and the little tube of ash fell on the tablecloth.
"Shit," she said, and swept the ash to the floor with a nervous movement of her fingers.
"Are you a biochemist, too?" Terzian asked.
"I’m a nurse." She looked at him with her pale eyes. "I work for Santa Croce–it’s a–"
"A relief agency." A Catholic one, he remembered. The name meant Holy Cross.
She nodded.
"Shouldn’t you go to the police?" he asked. And then his skepticism returned. "Oh, that’s right–it was the police who did the killing."
"Not the French police." She leaned across the table toward him. "This was a different sort of police, the kind who think that killing someone and making an arrest are the same thing. You look at the television news tonight. They’ll report the death, but there won’t be any arrests. Or any suspects." Her face darkened, and she leaned back in her chair to consider a new thought. "Unless they somehow manage to blame it on me."
Terzian remembered papers flying in the spring wind, men in heavy boots sprinting after. The pinched, pale face of the victim.
"Who, then?"
She gave him a bleak look through a curl of cigarette smoke. "Have you ever heard of Transnistria?"
Terzian hesitated, then decided "No" was the most sensible answer.
"The murderers are Transnistrian." A ragged smile drew itself across Stephanie’s face. "Their intellectual property police. They killed Adrian over a copyright."
At that point, the waiter brought Terzian’s coffee, along with Stephanie’s order. Hers was colossal, a huge glass goblet filled with pastel-colored ice creams and fruit syrups in bright primary colors, topped by a mountain of cream and a toy pinwheel on a candy-striped stick. Stephanie looked at the creation in shock, her eyes wide.
"I love ice cream," she choked, and then her eyes brimmed with tears and she began to cry.
Stephanie wept for a while, across the table, and, between sobs, choked down heaping spoonfuls of ice cream, eating in great gulps and swiping at her lips and tear-stained cheeks with a paper napkin.
The waiter stood quietly in the corner, but from his glare and the set of his jaw it was clear that he blamed Terzian for making the lovely woman cry.
Terzian felt his body surge with the impulse to aid her, but he didn’t know what to do. Move around the table and put an arm around her? Take her hand? Call someone to take her off his hands?
The latter, for preference.
He settled for handing her a clean napkin when her own grew sodden.
His skepticism had not survived the mention of the Transnistrian copyright police. This was far too bizarre to be a con–a scam was based on basic human desire, greed, or lust, not something as abstract as intellectual property. Unless there was a gang who made a point of targeting academics from the States, luring them with a tantalizing hook about a copyright worth murdering for. . . .
Eventually, the storm subsided. Stephanie pushed the half-consumed ice cream away, and reached for another cigarette.
He tapped his wedding ring on the table top, something he did when thinking. "Shouldn’t you contact the local police?" he asked. "You know something about this . . . death." For some reason he was reluctant to use the word murder. It was as if using the word would make something true, not the killing itself but his relationship to the killing . . . to call it murder would grant it some kind of power over him.
She shook her head. "I’ve got to get out of France before those guys find me. Out of Europe, if I can, but that would be hard. My passport’s in my hotel room, and they’re probably watching it."
"Because of this copyright."
Her mouth twitched in a half-smile. "That’s right."
"It’s not a literary copyright, I take it."
She shook her head, the half-smile still on her face.
"Your friend was a biologist." He felt a hum in his nerves, a certainty that he already knew the answer to the next question.
"Is it a weapon?" he asked.
She wasn’t surprised by the question. "No," she said. "No, just the opposite." She took a drag on her cigarette and sighed the smoke out. "It’s an antidote. An antidote to human folly."
"Listen," Stephanie said. "Just because the Soviet Union fell doesn’t mean that Sovietism fell with it. Sovietism is still there–the only difference is that its moral justification is gone, and what’s left is violence and extortion disguised as law enforcement and taxation. The old empire breaks up, and in the West you think it’s great, but more countries just meant more palms to be greased–all throughout the former Soviet empire you’ve got more ‘inspectors’ and ‘tax collectors,’ more ‘customs agents’ and ‘security directorates’ than there ever were under the Russians. All these people do is prey off their own populations, because no one else will do business with them unless they’ve got oil or some other resource that people want."
"Trashcanistans," Terzian said. It was a word he’d heard used of his own ancestral homeland, the former Soviet Republic of Armenia, whose looted economy and paranoid, murderous, despotic Russian puppet regime was supported only by millions of dollars sent to the country by Americans of Armenian descent, who thought that propping up the gang of thugs in power somehow translated into freedom for the fatherland.
Stephanie nodded. "And the worst Trashcanistan of all is Transnistria."
She and Terzian had left the café and taken a taxi back to the Left Bank and Terzian’s hotel. He had turned the television to a local station, but muted the sound until the news came on. Until then the station showed a rerun of an American cop show, stolid, businesslike detectives underplaying their latest sordid confrontation with tragedy.
The hotel room hadn’t been built for the queen-sized bed it now held, and there was an eighteen-inch clearance around the bed and no room for chairs. Terzian, not wanting Stephanie to think he wanted to get her in the sack, perched uncertainly on a corner of the bed, while Stephanie disposed herself more comfortably, sitting cross-legged in its center.
"Moldova was a Soviet republic put together by Stalin," she said. "It was made up of Bessarabia, which was a part of Romania that Stalin chewed off at the beginning of the Second World War, plus a strip of industrial land on the far side of the Dniester. When the Soviet Union went down, Moldova became ‘independent’–" Terzian could hear the quotes in her voice. "But independence had nothing to do with the Moldovan people, it was just Romanian-speaking Soviet elites going off on their own account once their own superiors were no longer there to restrain them. And Moldova soon split–first the Turkish Christians . . ."
"Wait a second," Terzian said. "There are Christian Turks?"
The idea of Christian Turks was not a part of his Armenian-American worldview.
Stephanie nodded. "Orthodox Christian Turks, yes. They’re called Gagauz, and they now have their own autonomous republic of Gagauzia within Moldova."
Stephanie reached into her pocket for a cigarette and her lighter.
"Uh," Terzian said. "Would you mind smoking out the window?"
Stephanie made a face. "Americans," she said, but she moved to the window and opened it, letting in a blast of cool spring air. She perched on the windowsill, sheltered her cigarette from the wind, and lit up.
"Where was I?" she asked.
"Turkish Christians."
"Right." Blowing smoke into the teeth of the gale. "Gagauzia was only the start–after that, a Russian general allied with a bunch of crooks and KGB types created a rebellion in the bit of Moldova that was on the far side of the Dniester–another collection of Soviet elites, representing no one but themselves. Once the Russian-speaking rebels rose against their Romanian-speaking oppressors, the Soviet Fourteenth Army stepped in as ‘peacekeepers,’ complete with blue helmets, and created a twenty-mile-wide state recognized by no other government. And that meant more military, more border guards, more administrators, more taxes to charge, and customs duties, and uniformed ex-Soviets whose palms needed greasing. And over a hundred thousand refugees who could be put in camps while the administration stole their supplies and rations. . . .
"But–" She jabbed the cigarette like a pointer. "Transnistria had a problem. No other nation recognized their existence, and they were tiny and had no natural resources, barring the underage girls they enslaved by the thousands to export for prostitution. The rest of the population was leaving as fast as they could, restrained only slightly by the fact that they carried passports no other state recognized, and that meant there were fewer people whose productivity the elite could steal to support their predatory post-Soviet lifestyles. All they had was a lot of obsolete Soviet heavy industry geared to produce stuff no one wanted.
"But they still had the infrastructure. They had power plants–running off Russian oil they couldn’t afford to buy–and they had a transportation system. So the outlaw regime set up to attract other outlaws who needed industrial capacity–the idea was that they’d attract entrepreneurs who were excused paying most of the local ‘taxes’ in exchange for making one big payoff to the higher echelon."
"Weapons?" Terzian asked.
"Weapons, sure," Stephanie nodded. "Mostly they’re producing cheap knockoffs of other people’s guns, but the guns are up to the size of howitzers. They tried banking and data havens, but the authorities couldn’t restrain themselves from ripping those off–banks and data run on trust and control of information, and when the regulators are greedy, short-sighted crooks, you don’t get either one. So what they settled on was, well, biotech. They’ve got companies creating cheap generic pharmaceuticals that evade Western patents. . . ." Her look darkened. "Not that I’ve got a problem with that, not when I’ve seen thousands dying of diseases they couldn’t afford to cure. And they’ve also got other companies who are ripping off Western genetic research to develop their own products. And as long as they make their payoffs to the elite, these companies remain completely unregulated. Nobody, not even the government, knows what they’re doing in those factories, and the government gives them security free of charge."
Terzian imagined gene-splicing going on in a rusting Soviet factory, rows and rows of mutant plants with untested, unregulated genetics, all set to be released on an unsuspecting world. Transgenic elements drifting down the Dniester to the Black Sea, growing quietly in its saline environment. . . .
"The news," Stephanie reminded, and pointed at the television.
Terzian reached for the control and hit the mute button, just as the throbbing, anxious music that announced the news began to fade.
The murder on the Ile de la Cité was the second item on the broadcast. The victim was described as a "foreign national" who had been fatally stabbed, and no arrests had been made. The motive for the killing was unknown.
Terzian changed the channel in time to catch the same item on another channel. The story was unchanged.
"I told you," Stephanie said. "No suspects. No motive."
"You could tell them."
She made a negative motion with her cigarette. "I couldn’t tell them who did it, or how to find them. All I could do is put myself under suspicion."
Terzian turned off the TV. "So what happened exactly? Your friend stole from these people?"
Stephanie swiped her forehead with the back of her wrist. "He stole something that was of no value to them. It’s only valuable to poor people, who can’t afford to pay. And–" She turned to the window and spun her cigarette into the street below. "I’ll take it out of here as soon as I can," she said. "I’ve got to try to contact some people." She closed the window, shutting out the spring breeze. "I wish I had my passport. That would change everything."
I saw a murder this afternoon, Terzian thought. He closed his eyes and saw the man falling, the white face so completely absorbed in the reality of its own agony.
He was so fucking sick of death.
He opened his eyes. "I can get your passport back," he said.
