Collected short fiction.., p.113
Collected Short Fiction of Greg Egan, page 113
I said, “You know where I’m staying. Once you find someone who needs persuading, let me know.”
He nodded sullenly, as if he’d seriously hoped I might have handed over a large wad of cash for miscellaneous bribes. I almost asked him about the “scratch”—Could it be some kind of coded message to the cognoscenti that the icon is older than it seems?—but I didn’t want to make a fool of myself. He’d seen it, and said nothing; perhaps it was just a meaningless computer glitch after all.
When I’d paid the bill, he stood up to depart, then bent down toward me and said quietly, “If you mention what I’m doing, to anyone, I’ll have you killed.”
I kept a straight face, and replied, “Vice versa.”
When he was gone, I tried to laugh. Stupid, swaggering child. I couldn’t quite get the right sound out, though. I didn’t imagine he’d be too happy if he found out what he’d trodden in. I took out my notepad, consulted the appointments diary, then let my right arm hang beside me for a second, dousing the floor with a fry-your-brains code to the remaining microspheres.
Then I took the picture of De Angelis from my wallet and held it in front of me on the table.
I said, “Am I in any danger? What do you think?”
She stared back at me, not quite smiling. The expression in her eyes might have been amusement, or it might have been concern. Not indifference; I was sure of that. But she didn’t seem prepared to start dispensing predictions or advice.
· · · · ·
Just as I was psyching myself up to tackle the hotel manager again, the relevant bureaucrat in the city government finally agreed to fax the hotel a pro forma statement acknowledging that my license was recognized throughout the jurisdiction. That seemed to satisfy the manager, though it said no more than the documents I’d already shown him.
The clerk at the check-in desk barely remembered De Angelis; he couldn’t say if she’d been cheerful or nervous, friendly or terse. She’d carried her own luggage; a porter remembered seeing her with the attaché case, and an overnight bag. (She’d spent the night in Zürich before collecting the icon.) She hadn’t used room service, or any of the hotel restaurants.
The cleaner who’d found the body had been born in Turin, according to his supervisor. I wasn’t sure if that was going to be a help or a hindrance. When I tracked him down in a basement storeroom, he said stubbornly, in German, “I told the police everything. Why are you bothering me? Go and ask them, if you want to know the facts.”
He turned his back on me. He seemed to be stock-taking carpet shampoo and disinfectant, but he made it look like a matter of urgency.
I said, “It must have been a shock for you. Someone so young. An eighty-year-old guest dying in her sleep … you’d probably take it in your stride. But Gianna was twenty-seven. A tragedy.” He tensed up at the sound of her name; I could see his shoulders tighten. Six days later? A woman he’d never even met?
I said, “You didn’t see her any time before, did you? You didn’t talk to her?”
“No.”
I didn’t believe him. The manager was a small-minded cretin; fraternising was probably strictly forbidden. This guy was in his twenties, good looking, spoke the same language. What had he done? Flirted with her harmlessly in a corridor for thirty seconds? And now he was afraid he’d lose his job if he admitted it?
“No one else will find out, if you tell me what she said. You have my word. It’s not like the cops, nothing has to be official. All I want to do is help lock up the fuckers who killed her.”
He put down the bar-code scanner and turned to face me. “I just asked her where she was from. What she was doing in town.”
Hairs stood up on the back of my neck. It had taken me so long to get even this close to her, I couldn’t quite believe it was happening.
“How did she react?”
“She was polite. Friendly. She seemed nervous, though. Distracted.”
“And what did she say?”
“She said she was from Milan.”
“What else?”
“When I asked her why she was in Vienna, she said she was playing chaperone.”
“What?”
“She said she wasn’t staying long. And she was only here to play chaperone. To an older lady.”
· · · · ·
Chaperone? I lay awake half the night, trying to make sense of that. Did it imply that she hadn’t given up custodianship of the icon? That she was still guarding it when she died? That she considered it to be Luciano Masini’s property, and still fully intended to deliver it to him, right to the end?
What had the “taxi driver” said to her? Bring the icon to Vienna for a day? No need to let it out of your sight? We don’t want to steal it … we just want to borrow it? To pray to it one last time before it vanishes into another western bank vault? But what was so special about this copy of the Vladimir Mother of God that made it worth so much trouble? The same thing that made it worth five million Swiss francs to Masini, possibly—but what?
And why had De Angelis blown her job, and risked imprisonment, to go along with the scheme? Even if she’d been blind to the obvious fact that it was all a set-up, what could they have offered her in exchange for flushing her career and reputation down the drain?
I’d only been asleep ten or twenty minutes when I was woken by someone pounding on the door of my room. By the time I’d staggered out of bed and pulled on my trousers, the police had grown impatient and let themselves in with a pass key. It wasn’t quite two a.m.
There were four of them, two in uniform. One waved a photograph in front of my face. I squinted at it. “Did you speak to this man? Yesterday?”
It was Anton. I nodded. If they didn’t already know the answer, they wouldn’t have asked the question.
“Will you come with us, please?”
“Why?”
“Because your friend is dead.”
They showed me the body, so I could confirm that it really was the same man. He’d been shot in the chest and dumped near the canal. Not in it; maybe the killers had been disturbed. In the morgue, the corpse was definitely shoeless, but it would have been worth sending out the microspheres’ code, just in case—the things could end up in the strangest places (nostrils, for a start). But before I could think of a plausible excuse to take the notepad from my pocket, they’d pulled the sheet back over his head and led me away for questioning.
The police had found my name and number in “Anton’s” notepad (if they knew his real name, they were keeping it to themselves … along with several other things I would have liked to have known, such as whether or not the ballistics matched the bullet used on De Angelis). I recounted the whole conversation in the restaurant, but left out the (illegal) microspheres; they’d find them soon enough, and I had nothing to gain by volunteering a confession.
I was treated with appropriate disdain, but not even verbally abused, really—a five star rating; I’d had ribs broken in Seveso, and a testicle crushed in Marseille. At half past four, I was free to leave.
Crossing from the interview room to the elevator, I passed half a dozen small offices; they were separated by partitions, but not fully enclosed. On one desk was a cardboard box, full of items of clothing in plastic bags.
I walked past, then stopped just out of sight. There was a man and a woman in the office, neither of whom I’d seen before, talking and making notes.
I walked back and poked my head into the office. I said, “Excuse me … could you tell me … please—?” I spoke German with the worst accent I could manage; I had a head start, it must have been dire. They stared at me, appalled. Visibly struggling for words, I pulled out my notepad and hit a few keys, fumbling with the phrasebook software, walking deeper into the office. I thought I saw a pair of shoes out of the corner of my eye, but I couldn’t be certain. “Could you tell me please where I could find the nearest public convenience?”
The man said, “Get out of here before I kick your head in.”
I backed out, smiling uncertainly. “Grazie, signore! Dankeschön!”
There was a surveillance camera in the elevator; I didn’t even glance at the notepad. Ditto for the foyer. Out on the street, I finally looked down.
I had the data from two hundred and seven microspheres. The software was already busy reconstructing Anton’s trail.
I was on the verge of shouting for joy when it occurred to me that I might have been better off if I hadn’t been able to follow him.
· · · · ·
The first place he’d gone from the restaurant looked like home; no one answered the door, but I could glimpse posters of several of the continent’s most pretentious rock bands through the windows. If not his own, maybe a friend’s place, or a girlfriend’s. I sat in an open air café across the street, sketching the visible outline of the apartment, guessing at walls and furniture, playing back the trace for the hours he’d spent there, then modifying my guesses, trying again.
The waiter looked over my shoulder at the multiple exposure of stick figures filling the screen. “Are you a choreographer?”
“Yes.”
“How exciting! What’s the name of the dance?”
“‘Making Phone Calls And Waiting Impatiently.’ Its an hommage to my two idols and mentors, Twyla Tharp and Pina Bausch.” The waiter was impressed.
After three hours, and no sign of life, I moved on. Anton had stopped by at another apartment, briefly. This one was occupied by a thin blond woman in her late teens.
I said, “I’m a friend of Anton’s. Do you know where I could find him?”
She’d been crying. “I don’t know anyone by that name.” She slammed the door. I stood in the hallway for a moment, wondering: Did I kill him? Did someone detect the spheres, and put a bullet in his heart because of them? But if they’d found them, they would have destroyed them; there would have been no trail to follow.
He’d only visited one more location before taking a car trip to the canal, lying very still. It turned out to be a detached two-story house in an upmarket district. I didn’t ring the doorbell. There was no convenient observation post, so I did a single walk-by. The curtains were drawn, no vehicles were parked nearby.
A few blocks away, I sat on a bench in a small park and started phoning databases. The house had been leased just three days before; I had no trouble finding out about the owner—a corporate lawyer with property all over the city—but I couldn’t get hold of the new tenant’s name.
Vienna had a centralized utilities map, to keep people from digging into underground power cables and phone lines by accident. Phone lines were useless to me; no one who made the slightest effort could be bugged that way anymore. But the house had natural gas; easier to swim through than water, and much less noisy.
I bought a shovel, boots, gloves, a pair of white overalls, and a safety helmet. I captured an image of the gas company logo from its telephone directory entry, and jet-sprayed it onto the helmet; from a distance, it looked quite authentic. I summoned up all the bravado I had left, and returned to the street—beyond sight of the house, but as close to it as I dared. I shifted a few paving slabs out of the way, then started digging. It was early afternoon; there was light traffic, but very few pedestrians. An old man peeked out at me from a window of the nearest house. I resisted the urge to wave to him; it wouldn’t have rung true.
I reached the gas main, climbed down into the hole, and pressed a small package against the PVC; it extruded a hollow needle which melted the plastic chemically, maintaining the seal as it penetrated the walls of the pipe. Someone passed by on the footpath, walking two large slobbering dogs; I didn’t look up.
The control box chimed softly, signaling success. I refilled the hole, replaced the paving slabs, and returned to the hotel for some sleep.
· · · · ·
I’d left a narrow fiber-optic cable leading from the buried control box to the unpaved ground around a nearby tree, the end just a few millimeters beneath the soil. The next morning, I collected all the stored data, then went back to the hotel to sift through it.
Several hundred bugs had made it into the house’s gas pipes and back to the control box, several times—eavesdropping in hour-long overlapping shifts, then returning to disgorge the results. The individual sound tracks were often abysmal, but by processing all of them together, the software could usually come up with intelligible speech.
There were five voices, three male, two female. All used French, though I wouldn’t have sworn it was everyone’s native tongue.
I pieced things together slowly. They didn’t have the icon—they’d been hired to find it, by someone called Katulski. Apparently they’d paid Anton to keep an ear to the ground, but he’d come back to them asking for more money, in exchange for not switching his loyalty to me. The trouble was, he really had nothing tangible to offer … and they’d just had a tip-off from another source. References to his murder were oblique, but maybe he’d tried to blackmail them in some way when they’d told him he was no longer needed. One thing was absolutely clear, though: they were taking turns watching an apartment on the other side of the city, where they believed the man who’d killed De Angelis would eventually show up.
I hired a car and followed two of them when they set out to relieve the watch. They’d rented a room across the street from their target; with my IR binoculars I could see where they were aiming theirs. The place under observation looked empty; all I could make out through the tatty curtains was peeling paint.
I called the police from a public phone; the synthesized voice of my notepad spoke for me. I left an anonymous message for the cop who’d interrogated me, giving the code which would unlock the data in the microspheres. Forensic would have found them almost immediately, but extracting the information by brute-force microscopy would have taken days.
Then I waited.
Five hours later, around three a.m., the two men I’d followed left in a hurry, without replacements. I took out my photo of De Angelis and inspected it in the moonlight. I still don’t understand what it was about her that held me in her sway; she was either a thief, or a fool. Possibly both. And whatever she was, it had killed her.
I said, “Don’t just stand there smirking like you know all the answers. How about wishing me luck?”
· · · · ·
The building was ancient, and in bad repair. I had no trouble picking the lock on the front door, and though the stairs creaked all the way to the top floor, I encountered no one.
There was a tell-tale pattern of electric fields detectable through the door of apartment 712; it looked like it was wired-up with ten different kinds of alarm. I picked the lock of the neighboring apartment. There was an access hatch in the ceiling—fortuitously right above the sofa. Someone below moaned in their sleep as I pulled my legs up and closed the hatch. My heart was pounding from adrenaline and claustrophobia, burglary in a foreign city, fear, anticipation. I played a torch-beam around; mice went scurrying.
The corresponding hatch in 712 was guarded just like the door. I moved to another part of the ceiling, lifted away the thermal insulation, then cut a hole in the plaster and lowered myself into the room.
I don’t know what I’d expected to find. A shrine covered with icons and votive candles? Occult paraphernalia and a stack of dusty volumes on the teachings of Slavonic mystics?
There was nothing in the room but a bed, a chair, and a VR rig plugged into the phone socket. Vienna had kept up with the times; even this dilapidated apartment had the latest high-bandwidth ISDN.
I glanced down at the street; there was no one in sight. I put my ear to the door; if anyone was ascending the stairs, they were far quieter than I’d been.
I slipped the helmet over my head.
The simulation was a building, larger than anything I’d ever seen, stretching out around me like a stadium, like a colosseum. In the distance—perhaps two hundred meters away—were giant marble columns topped with arches, holding up a balcony with an ornate metal railing, and another set of columns, supporting another balcony … and so on, to six tiers. The floor was tile, or parquetry, with delicate angular braids outlining a complex hexagonal pattern in red and gold. I looked up—and, dazzled, threw my arms in front of my face (to no effect). The hall of this impossible cathedral was topped with a massive dome, the scale defying calculation. Sunlight poured in through dozens of arched windows around the base. Above, covering the dome, was a figurative mosaic, the colors exquisite beyond belief. My eyes watered from the brightness; as I blinked away the tears, I could begin to make out the scene. A haloed woman stretched out her hand—
Someone pressed a gun barrel to my throat.
I froze, waiting for my captor to speak. After a few seconds, I said in German, “I wish someone would teach me to move that quietly.”
A young male voice replied, in heavily accented English: “’He who possesses the truth of the word of Jesus can hear even its silence.’ Saint Ignatius of Antioch.” Then he must have reached over to the rig control box and turned down the volume—I’d planned to do that myself, but it had seemed redundant—because I suddenly realized that I’d been listening to a blanket of white noise.
He said, “Do you like what we’re building? It was inspired by the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople—Justinian’s Church of the Divine Wisdom—but it’s not a slavish copy. The new architecture has no need to make concessions to gross matter. The original in Istanbul is a museum, now—and of course it was used as a mosque for five centuries before that. But there’s no prospect of either fate befalling this holy place.”
“No.”
“You’re working for Luciano Masini, aren’t you?”
I couldn’t think of a plausible lie which would make me any more popular. “That’s right.”
