Death in Florence

by George Alec Effinger

  "I'm Norman Moore," he said. "And we're in the best of all possible positions for speculations. That's all we can do, is speculate. If we had information, we wouldn't need to speculate."

  "Is there anything else I can do for you?" Wesley clapped the notebook shut and returned it to its place beneath the counter.

  "Not now," said Moore. "I want to think about all this. I want to, uh, speculate."

  Wesley's face was grim. "That's your privilege, Mr. Moore," he said. "At least, for the time being."

  "We'll see you around," said Moore. He felt happy. He walked out of the office thinking about making radish slaw for dinner.

  * * *

  Moore had a feeling that Eileen Brant was going to make another surprise visit to Prague. He woke up one morning and knew for sure that she was arriving soon. He was excited. He made a thorough search in his favorite neighborhood for an attractive, clean, and well-furnished house. Then he began preparing interesting foods for her. He wished that he could make a potato-cake roll, with vanilla ice cream rolled up in a layer of potato cake. Instead, he made his mother's special snack drink, lemon-prune nog. It was good for any complaint that clear chicken soup with noodles couldn't handle. He opened tins of goose liver. He ground up potatoes to make knedliky, the heavy spherical potato dumplings. He made a cache of pivo, Czech beer. He found some bottles of wine, a nice St. Emilion, some Puligny-Montrachet, and vintage champagne. For some reason, he had stopped feeling sad about the French wine disaster that Utopia 3 would soon cause. He knew that he would have all the wine he'd ever need. Instead of the wine, he thought only about Brant.

  He waited. He waited all day, but she didn't come. He sat in the kitchen the second day, but he was still alone and bored. The third day was the same. On the fourth day he threw out the knedliky. The lemon-prune nog started to smell bad, so he threw it into the brick street. The St. Emilion disappeared first, then the champagne. When he finished the champagne he went to sleep. When he woke up it was morning, but he wondered how long he had slept and what day it was.

  When he went out to find more wine, he saw another series of posters paging him from the walls of most of the buildings in Prague.

  S. NORMAN MOORE! S. NORMAN MOORE! HEED THIS ANNOUNCEMENT! MOST URGENT! COME AT ONCE TO THE UTOPIA 3 OFFICE! VERY IMPORTANT!

  Moore shrugged when he read the message, but he started off to the office.

  "Hello, Donna," he said, as she turned around in response to the little bell over the door.

  "Hello, Mr. Moore," she said. Her voice was curt. He suspected that she still harbored some kind of grudge against him. She went to the end of the bar, fiddled with something beneath it, and picked up a set of earphones and a microphone. He couldn't hear what she said, but after a few moments she signaled that he should move down near her. She handed him the earphones, which he put on his head. He took the microphone from her.

  "Hello, S. Norman Moore? This is Dr. Waters."

  Norman raised an eyebrow. "Hello," he said. He couldn't think of anything else to say.

  "Moore, I have someone here who wants to speak with you." There was a brief pause, and then the voice of an old woman came through.

  "Hello, Norman?" she said.

  "Mom?" he said, startled.

  "Yes, baby, it's me. Dr. Waters flew me all the way from New York."

  "Why, Mom? What for?"

  "I'm supposed to give you your oath," she said. "I have to administer this oath."

  "What oath?" asked Moore.

  "He wants to know what oath," his mother said. There was a brief pause.

  Waters's voice came back on. "Your oath of allegiance," he said. "Your oath sealing the bargain. Your options for my food."

  "What if I've decided to refuse?"

  "Aw, come on, Moore. We have your mother here."

  Moore felt cold. "You brought my mother over to persuade me?"

  Waters laughed. "You're already persuaded, aren't you, Norman?" he asked. "I just wanted to reunite you. Are you ready for the oath?"

  "I suppose," said Norman. He listened to silence for a short time.

  "It's me again, Norman."

  "Okay, Mom."

  "Norman, did you get my letters? You've never written."

  Moore sighed. "No, Mom, I haven't gotten any mail since I've been in here."

  "Still, you should write. Your cousin Marge is getting married."

  "Just give me the oath, Mom. Let's get it over with."

  HAVE YOU BEEN PAYING ATTENTION?

  Have you been paying attention? We're about three-quarters of the way through this book, and maybe it's a good time to sit back and evaluate just what kind of a job you're doing. Whether or not you are enjoying this novel, it might be fun to challenge yourself with the following questions. To top it off, the pure pleasure of the little quiz is not the only reward—no, no, there will be prizes, too! More details about that after the ten brain-teasers. Ready? Then let's go!

  1. Bo Staefler was obsessed with a pinball machine. What was its name?

  2. When the bus brought Staefler, Moore, and Brant to the orientation lodge for the first time, a man had become ill and had gotten off the bus. What was his name?

  3. Moore and Staefler had a fist fight in the snow on what mountain?

  4. Who painted the huge canvas above Staefler's bed in the Doges' Palace?

  5. Dr. Bertram Waters was the head of which department at Ivy University?

  6. When Staefler was compelled to return to the orientation lodge, he spent the night with the proctor who administered his test. What was her first name?

  7. The Utopia 3 office in Prague was located in a tavern made famous in a novel by a famous Czech writer. What was his name?

  8. At which spa did S. Norman Moore find pottery straws?

  9. In one of his posters, Sandor Courane told of a utopiate who was returned to the orientation lodge for asking questions about water purification. In what town had this utopiate taken up residence?

  10. Moore went to see Donna Lupowicz in the Utopia 3 office in Prague once, when Lupowicz was reading a book with a pink cover and spine. What was the title of this book?

  The contest ends December 31, 1979. Void where prohibited by law. NO PURCHASE NECESSARY! Sodium proprionate added to retard spoilage.

  Four

  Queene Eileen

  It was chilly at night. Near her bed in the Pitti Palace, Eileen Brant had set up a small stove. She broke branches from trees near the palace and placed the wood carefully in the stove. Around the kindling she stuffed paper—the most plentiful paper nearby turned out to be thousand-lire notes in the cash registers— and then soaked it all with lighter fluid. The money burned quickly, and the branches were consumed in less than an hour. By the first week in September, Brant had learned to use different sizes of wood. First she put twigs by the handful on top of the burning lire; then she added larger sticks; when the fire was burning well, she shoved in branches as thick as her arm. This made an area of warmth that toasted her until she fell asleep. When the night was cold she slept deep beneath her quilts and comforters. Her body was warm enough but her face was cold, and in the morning sometimes she woke up stifling with the covers pulled up over her head.

  On warm mornings she rose early and entertained herself with a wide variety of activities. On cold mornings, however, she stayed in bed for hours, delaying the necessity of stepping out onto the arctic wastes of the marble floor. She actually preferred staying in bed, although the varied pursuits seemed to her to be healthier in a psychological sense. She liked lying in bed with a book and a box of Kleenex nearby. She pretended that she had the flu and was staying home from school. She remembered when she had been a girl, how much she liked to stay home and see all the television programs she normally missed. In those days she didn't get to stay home very often, and now as an adult she pretended that she had no responsibilities.

  This fantasy and the energy Brant spent in maintaining it hid from her the frightening fact that she real
ly and truly didn't have any responsibilities. She had nothing to do. She was worthless to anyone but herself. She was pointless. There was nothing except surface defects and irregularities to distinguish her from anyone else in Utopia 3. This was a fact that sometimes began to take form in Brant's mind, but she was always quick to brick up mental walls to hide it.

  What this all meant was that as the days and weeks of Utopia 3 passed, she worked to improve her mind and her personality. As she saw it, she became more charming and more well-bred. She climbed the distance from her old life to a life more sophisticated. From sophisticated she rose to cosmopolitan, then to stately. It was simple then to pass through aristocratic and genteel into the nobility. She became first regal and then, in her estimation, majestic, all the while lying in bed with a runny nose, reading Agatha Christie.

  Brant decided to stop at majestic because she was really unsure what the next step was, and the quality of life at those elevations made her giddy. Majestic was fine, and she was satisfied with it, and she didn't want to appear greedy and without taste. The entire process had been necessary, after all, and virtually dictated by Utopia 3. "If I live in the Pitti Palace," she told herself, "I've got to be somebody. You don't get to live in the Pitti Palace unless you're somebody. Before Utopia 3, even the Rockefellers couldn't get in on Tuesdays."

  Brant had a suspicion that she needed other people near her. She treasured her privacy, but she still felt that one couldn't be majestic unless someone else experienced and reflected the majesty. Grandeur was a relative concept. There is no glory without the applause of the mundane. So, contrary to her own innermost wishes, she hoped that someone would come to see her. She was not desperate, enough to issue invitations, but she was starting to miss having company around. These feelings and odd thoughts sometimes made her curious. She had not thought these things in her old life. But then, she admitted, in her old life she had never been in the fifth month of pregnancy before.

  Brant thought a great deal about her impending motherhood. She did little else. Her pregnancy had caused her to isolate herself in the palace. She rarely went outside except to find food and water and wood for her stove. She knew that having a baby was a serious and complex thing. She would have to provide for the child until it was old enough to take care of itself. According to everything she had learned in her former circumstances, and according to the few English language books she could find, that process might take years. She had to be prepared to offer the child a wide range of benefits, from sharing food and water to providing clothing, education, and instruction in moral and ethical matters. Brant was not deceived; she knew that in these areas she would be sadly deficient. But she would do the best job she could, and she sincerely hoped that the child would understand in its later years.

  Being pregnant while the year moved inexorably through Virgo was an amusing experience. Brant felt out of touch with herself, unable to recall how she acted or thought before she entered Utopia 3. Florence was not a Virgo city. Virgo's powers increased farther south. Brant considered taking a car and searching for a temporary home somewhere in a vicinity more in tune with the stars. But then, she reasoned, she would have to do it all over again in a few weeks, and then she'd be wandering all over Europe as a camp follower of the zodiac. That sounded stupid to her.

  "I wonder what my child will be like," she thought. "I wonder if it will be a boy or a girl. I wonder if it will be one hundred per cent normal, or if it will have a tragic deformity. I wonder if it will find a place in this crazy, mixed-up world of ours, or if it will know only the frustrations. I hope it will forgive me my shortcomings. I hope it will remember me with affection on its deathbed. I wonder what it will think of the Pitti Palace. Maybe I should give it its own palace. It would mean a lot of walking for me, and it would mean the poor thing would be alone a lot, but at least it won't track mud in my palace and slam the screen door. I wonder what I should feed it. I wonder if it will hurt. I wonder who its father is."

  Having a baby was something that Brant could have in common with many other women all through recorded history. She realized that as unpleasant as it might be, pregnancy was one way of establishing her identity. It gave her a kind of purpose, one that Dr. Waters could never know for himself. It very definitely set her apart from the other people, men and women, who had nothing particular to do for the next several months. Giving birth was a momentous event in a woman's life. It was so unique that it served as the source of many of life's most humorous stories and terrifying myths. The only other comparable situations were seduction and death.

  "Will he be handsome?" said Brant aloud, as she brushed her hair, looking in a silver mirror. "Will she be beautiful? Will they— I hope it's not a they-be handsome and beautiful?" She smiled, picturing herself bouncing an indefinite baby on her knee. Then her smile faded. She felt a chill and shuddered. "What? What, my God, if it's a monster? A chimera? A sphinx? A fury, a graea, a gorgon, a harpy, a minotaur, a cyclops?" She felt tears come to her eyes. She regretted the literature course she had taken at Community College. She imagined herself standing on a bridge over the Arno, holding a burlap bag. Inside the bag were several heavy stones and an infant Typhon. She saw her fingers separate, and the bag dropped slowly into the heaving dark river. Brant let her breath out slowly and shuddered again. Pregnancy was certainly more demanding than she had anticipated.

  One morning at the end of the fifth month, Brant woke up feeling frightened. She didn't understand why but guessed that she had had a nightmare. She pulled the covers up to her chin and stared across the cold, bare hall. She felt the child kick in her belly. She gritted her teeth. She hated the reminders of the growing child. Sometimes she resented the baby's use of her body, like some kind of workshop. Brant was working overtime and holidays, and the only thing she had gotten for it all was a distortion of her normally trim lines. She wanted the whole thing to be over.

  Apparently, so did Dr. Bertram Waters. There was a poster fixed to one of the entrances to the palace. Brant saw it when she went out to get food. She paused and read it. It said:

  Hello, Eileen. How are you this morning? Fine, I hope. Oh, by the way, this is Dr. Waters. Well, I guess it will come as no surprise for me to tell you that you're pregnant. I've heard from Buddy and Claire at the Utopia 3 office in FLORENCE. They say you're already beginning to show that ethereal glow so common among expectant mothers. I'll bet there was never a mommy-to-be with quite your radiant charm. Still, I can't be far wrong in supposing that this pregnancy is, in some respects, an inconvenience. You've already had to make adjustments, and there will be more aggravations to come.

  Why not make it easier on yourself? There's a simple, safe solution. No, of course you can't do it yourself, and you're intelligent enough to realize that you would have to come to me—rather, to us—in order to be entirely certain of protecting your physical condition. So, to make it simpler, I'd like to take this time to outline briefly my thoughts on the matter.

  We are, of course, talking about abortion. It is a difficult subject to discuss calmly, because so many emotional factors are involved, both in favor of abortion and against. You probably know my stand: I am against it from the word "go," so to speak, as I am against all methods of birth control within Utopia 3. But I am not irreversibly against abortion; I agree that in special circumstances it is the only reasonable course. Could yours be one of these cases?

  You tell me. Come on in and visit with Buddy and Claire. Talk the problem over with them—you are under no obligation. Sometimes it helps to get the advice of disinterested parties. And while you're there, why not tell them that you've thought it over and that you're willing to sign over to me your options on the small areas of Utopia 3, as I outlined them to you several weeks ago. I can be very grateful, Eileen.

  Well, got to run. Catch you again soon. Remember what I said. In the meantime, good luck and may God bless.

  "Ha," said Brant. Dr. Waters may have known everything, but he knew it a little too late, evident
ly. Turning into the sixth month of her pregnancy, Brant thought it was getting a bit too far gone for what he was suggesting. As she walked away, she felt a poke from her baby. "Easy there. Whoa," she thought. She wished that someone could invent a Pepto-Bismol for the womb.

  * * *

  One night, on the waning end of Virgo, while she lay in her bed reading a romance novel about a governess and a handsome but mysterious gentleman, Eileen Brant heard a loud siren. "A siren," she thought. The sound of the siren made her feel warm and good. She wondered why; sirens had never made her feel that way before. "I wonder who it is?" she thought. She got up and put on a pair of loose pajama bottoms and a heavy flannel shirt. She stooped down and gathered up all the wads of Kleenex on the marble floor. She hurriedly straightened up the quilts on the bed and fluffed up the pillow. She put her other belongings in order and looked around the hall. There was nothing else for her to do. She shrugged. Taking a candle to light her way, she went through the immense palace, down to the front entrance onto the parking lot. As she walked through the grim dark galleries, she noticed how frightening they seemed. The shadows startled her with their quick movements. The black corners and invisible ceilings concealed vague dangers that she tried to ignore. She did not like the walk downstairs, and only the hope of seeing someone else kept her going. Once downstairs she would not want to come back alone. She knew that she would spend the night somewhere else instead, rather than make the return trip through the dark palace.

  The doors were heavy, and Brant always had trouble getting them open. Now, as she strained against one door she felt it suddenly swing easily. She saw a hand not her own and realized that the owner of the siren was helping her. She gasped; she was relieved, dismayed, happy, and alarmed. The hand belonged to a tall person. Behind the tall person stood another person, much shorter. "I wonder who—" thought Brant.