Читать книгу Operation Isis - E. Hoffmann Price - Страница 8

Chapter 5

Shortly after the cathedral clock bonged the fifth melodious note, Flora paused at the door of her son’s quarters. Instead of knocking, she balanced on one foot and gave the panel a flat-footed kick—she needed both hands to hold a tray of snacks. Garvin Senior stood by with a basket of bottles, glassware, mixers, and accessories. She had warned Felix by intercom that the Old Man would be over for cocktails. She got this answer:

“Aw, hell!” he’d replied. “I ought to be going over to the big house to—”

“To pay respects to your father,” she cut in. “Always the formal, continental gentlemen.”

With Old World savoir faire, Felix accepted his mother’s restrained reproof. “I knew you two would be sitting up until all hours, and I didn’t want to break into your sleep.”

“With you two men of iron roaring like lions and getting drunker than hoot owls, how would I ever catch up on sleep?” Now she said, “Don’t stand there gaping! Please take this tray.”

Felix did so. The Old Man crossed the threshold and plopped the basket on what would be the study table when and if his son ever resumed school. Flora’s departure left two strangers confronting each other.

Tightly spaced seconds followed the latch click of Flora’s departure.

This was a new situation for Garvin. When he had met Azadeh’s son, his firstborn, the boy had been six years old and, since his grandfather’s death, head of the house. This was never in doubt, however his mother ruled him with an iron hand. Self-assured from birth, Toghrul Bek had accepted the newcomer as a foreigner to be accepted because his mother did so. Facing Felix, however, was dismayingly different.

This fellow, a bit over two meters tall, regarded Garvin with self-assurance of an utterly different flavor: a critical appraisal, as if about to break into song, “I Am the King of Siam, I am!” All in good will and without a trace of condescension. Purely good fellowship. Not a suggestion of a skipper’s “Welcome aboard!” Nevertheless—”

The Old Man thrust out his hand. “Long time, no see!”

Felix took the hand, grinned, and wagged his head. “I should be saying, I’ve heard so much about you that it’s almost as if I’d known you all my life.” Urbane, whimsical, Felix was clearly enjoying the oddity of the situation. “There’s a lot the books don’t cover,” he added.

“Such as?”

“Well, if someone called me Jesus, I’d have to say, balls, mister, I am only his second begotten son.”

“For someone your size and grown-upness, the books do not fit. I am Rod, not God, so I won’t be calling you Jesus. Not even if we get to Latin America.”

Felix reached for a bottle, and they drank to realistic nomenclature.

The place was stark as a noncom’s room in barracks. A pair of foils and another of épées were in a wall rack; cestas, the pelican-beak-shaped wicker claws of the pelota player, kept them company.

Garvin eyed the array. “I’d say that pelota is the man-killingest of the lot.” In pelota, the ball was smacked about at pistol-bullet velocity.

“Those Basque players have made that plenty clear to me! You ever play?”

“Wars and the world trying to decide whether I was going to be an air freighter or a space tramp kept me too busy, but I did see some pelota in Cuba and Mexico.”

Thanks to the North American tourist trade, Felix had found a bottle of real bourbon, Old Grandmother—Barrel Proof, at Chevigny’s liquor store on rue Pont Neuf. The Senior Garvin, utilizing spare time in Paris, had located a bottle of Hudson’s Bay Company Demerara Rum, 151 proof. This he dug from the basket of things appropriate to a meeting of Men of Iron.

Since Old Grandmother was only 114 proof, Felix took a jolt of Demerara, downing it without a hitch.

“With stuff this strong,” he declared, “I usually take a chaser. How about a dollop of that Palo Cortado sherry?”

Things were getting off to a good start. Garvin noticed no frilly shower cap in the bathroom, no opulent mules, no sexy robe accidentally displayed to advertise that Felix was a man of the world. That the boy had not decided on Old Grandmother as a chaser for the 151 proof rum and, instead, joined the old man in getting acquainted with that stern and rugged sherry added to the Old Man’s favorable impression of his son. He’d have to tell Flora that as far as language was concerned, she was lucky that her only son had learned Americanese from a hitchhiking Dutch teenager and not from the Marine Corps.

“Lots of young fellows hate military service. How come you went out of your way to get in?”

“I get points for not pleading exemption because my birth as an American citizen was recorded at the embassy. With my papers, I can leave the country with no fooling around and being told the last minute that the bureaucrat in charge of getting exit papers cleared got AIDS while vacationing in Sardinia and is taking a sick leave till he is cured.”

“Sardine hunting in Sardinia is a hazardous sport,” the Old Man agreed. He did not raise any points such as heading for Indonesia the next time the young Dutch traveler paused on an outbound voyage; he likewise skipped the idea that after so much female supervision, any lad worth half an inflated pazor per pound would look for an escape hatch. For any boy more than ten or a dozen years old, his mother ceases being his best friend and becomes his most destructive enemy.

Since thought moves with nearly the velocity of light, only a second elapsed before Garvin added, “We cleaned house after the last war, but I’m still wondering if we’ll ever be liberated from our bureaucracy.”

There was a long pause. “How long are you going to be in town?” Felix asked abruptly.

“That depends on when the Semiramis shoves off for Savannah.”

“Spaceman, and not flying?”

Garvin reached for the bottle of Old Grandmother and poured for each of them. “There is all the glamour crap about capers such as the time your mother, hating space, flew all the way to Maritania to wish me bon voyage on what the fat boys had arranged to be for a one-way cruise. But I did circle Saturn, and homebound, as skipper, I performed the first wedding ceremony in space. Married my technical adviser, Admiral Courtney, to Lani, who became a princess after he died and then Empress of North America.

“I discovered, by pure blundering luck, an inhabited asteroid.”

Felix poured the Palo Cortado chaser and not the Demerara rum, as Garvin had been expecting. “Madame my mother told me about that till it bubbled out of my ears.”

“I was afraid of that! Well, aside from such high spots, there is nothing drearier than spacing through millions of kilometers of nothing and nowhere. I am here to review my acquaintance with E-A-R-T-H, Earth, till I get good and fed up with it and remember the unfinished business on Mars.”

“So it depends on the Semiramis?”

“It’s a goddamn long swim, and I’m not the athlete I used to be.” He raised his hand to check the forthcoming protest. “That was a sort of short answer. It’s this way. She is a tramp waiting for cargo till she’s down to her Plimsoll line. But if that’s done before I am ready to leave town, the skipper will hold the boat.”

“I be good-goddamned! This Governor-General business seems to give you a lot of pull!”

“Wait a minute! I am incognito, remember? I’m only a shirttail relative.”

Felix looked puzzled. After a moment of groping, he asked how a remote kinsman could make such an arrangement.

“Just a matter of paying demurrage,” Garvin explained, “the way you do when you keep a freight car longer than the free time for loading or unloading. With my salary, allowances, legitimate perks and presents, and nowhere to go to spend it—simple, isn’t it?”

Felix cogitated for a moment. “Excepting that pipsqueak of an Asteroid, there is nothing in the Solar System that needs governing once you get beyond Mars.”

“You mean opportunities for advancement are limited?”

Felix was too serious about it to realize that the Old Man was needling him as if he were a collegian with a brand new degree whining about the slow promotion when he found out that he could not start as one of the board of directors.

“Rod, the whole business sounds like tough shit! First you were a war hero, but before you got your Parliamentary Medal of Honor, they discovered you were a war criminal, and if the Imperator hadn’t flung in every bit of political pull he had, along with some he borrowed, you’d have been shot. Death sentence was commuted to exile, until things got so hot in the next war that to settle the risk of the Imperatrix being taken prisoner of war and held as a hostage, you came back on parole and convoyed her to Mars, where she’d be safe, and you became Governor-General, sort of her errand boy.”

“Sounds like making it the hard way?”

“Well, it’s this war criminal business.”

“From the original democratic republic, and all through the Democratic Parliamentary Republic, and well into the Empire of North America, ever since the middle nineteen-forties, swarms of American-born Liberals voted Marxist-loving politicos into office. There was a president who thought that Marxism was the greatest discovery of the century, which from then on made the nation a sort of vassal of the Slivovitz group of nations. Then there was a politico who discovered Americans holding high spots in the state department who were Slivovitz agents. He hounded them into the open, nailed their hides on the barn door, and eventually became president of the Republic. Then the Liberals caught him off base, and he ended by resigning to avoid being impeached.”

“Where do you come in?”

“During the Hitler war—since you’ve not gone to American schools, you may have had history, which was abolished as irrelevant in our country—we blasted German and Japanese cities, incinerated civilians by the thousands, and everyone applauded, but when we used napalm and similar grim stuff in southeast Asia, there was hell from coast to coast, student riots, all that muck. You must never be rough with a Marxist and never win a battle when you face Marxist troops. State religion, unofficial but working.

“I vaporized a division of Marxist armor invading Sinkiang. Hence the pyramids!”

Felix paused to digest that before going on to the next mystery. “The Empress you convoyed to Mars turned out to be a look-alike, and everyone still wonders what happened to the genuine one.”

“There is a mishmash of contradictory details. Some of the facts are still top secret, or so we hope. This much is declassified, and I am allowed to tell you what lots of people already have heard.

“The Imitation Empress died, and I kept my promise to take her home and have her buried beside Alexander I, your mother’s fifth cousin. She was a sincere woman, and I was a horse’s arse, keeping that promise. There already had been leaks in security.”

Felix leaned forward, all set, like a leopard about to pounce. Before the feline snarl slipped from between tightening lips, Garvin continued. “A Lunar Base patrol signaled my cruiser to stand by for inspection.”

“Whatja do?”

“My cruiser was one of the flotilla that killed a Marxist division of armor. She was disguised with sheet metal that gave her a freighter silhouette.”

“Then what?”

“The fool in command fired a warning shot across our bow. I wagged my forefinger, and the officer on watch cut loose with gunnery that had never been tested on Terra. That illegal command to stand by got total destruction. Cruiser and crew left no debris in space. They were vapor, waiting for a comet to join.”

Felix exhaled a long-locked breath.

“The total disappearance of a patrol ship without a general quarters call to Lunar Headquarters confirmed the validity of the security leak,” the Old Man said. “Son of a bitch, a man can never win!”

“Dumb bastards learned that Garvin is poison.”

“They always knew that, but they are dedicated.”

The Old Man was doing nicely. The new problem was to live up to the image developed over the years: the skill, the cunning, the experience of twenty boys and a third the energy of one. And then Garvin learned that he was fatally vulnerable, that he had defenses he was not able to use.

“You brought the Imitation Empress back home for burial.”

“Yes. Mission accomplished.”

“And you didn’t have time to detour to France and see Mom and me.”

However this had gnawed at Garvin, year after year, this was the ultimate thrust. Facts at the time of happening had been Garvin’s consolation. These, now history, were old and toothless, as weary as he himself had become. Events could justify him. Explanations would be futile.

Felix was on his feet. Glancing at his watch, he fixed the Old Man with the eye of decision. “There is a get-together banquet in Biarritz. Pelota sharks and novices and professionals, and fans, and a tournament series. Mind telling Madame the Old Lady that I forgot to mention this appointment? Got to haul ass out, right now.”

He extended his hand. “Maybe I’ll lose out in the preliminaries and be back before you board the Semiramis.”

It was an awkward but resolute dismissal. Garvin took the extended hand. “Tell your mother that on my way back to Maritania, I’ll be stopping in Bayonne.”