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 them 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 man 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 be 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. "They're 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 retrain 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 in 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 from 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 dr
ifting 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 Île 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 friends." 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.
Anger kept him moving until he saws the killers, across the street from Stephanie's hotel, sitting at an outdoor table in a café-bar. Terzian recognized them immediately—he didn't need to look at the heavy shoes, or the broad faces with their disciplined military mustaches—one glance at the crowd at the café showed the only two in the place who weren't French. That was probably how Stephanie knew to speak to him in English, he just didn't dress or carry himself like a Frenchman, for all that he'd worn an anonymous coat and tie. He tore his gaze away before they saw him gaping at them.
The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories Page 16
