Greenhouse Summer Page 3

  Which made her, even by her own lights, the perfect Bread & Circuses VIP operative for these Land of the Lost ventures by the Mervin Appelbaums of the world.

  For while B&C was a modern postcapitalist syndic and therefore by definition and economic self-interest a creature of the Green climes, the Lands of the Winners, where the money was, a good portion of its billing was racked up by outfits like Advanced Projects Associates and, worse, dedicated to further enriching the greedy at the expense of the needy.

  Who better to serve as an interface between than someone who was Blue on the inside, Green on the outside.

  Or was it the other way around?

  How did that old riddle go?

  Is a zebra a white animal with black stripes or a black animal with white stripes?

  Well, there might be no zebras left in the wild these days, but Monique reckoned that there were plenty of animals like her still running free who fit the modern answer to the old riddle.

  A Monique Calhoun was no-colored animal with blue and green stripes.

  It was a balmy March afternoon in Paris, no more than 28 °C, humidity no more than fifty percent, and the breezes that had cooled down the heat and unsogged the atmosphere had also cleansed the air of pollution and turned the sky a cerulean blue.

  These same breezes blowing through the bamboo forest in the Tuileries Gardens set the stems waving and clattering against each other, sending the skittish parrots flying, but providing Eric Esterhazy with the musical accompaniment of nature’s own marimba band as he stalked his quarry.

  Nevertheless, Prince Eric was less than content. It just did not seem right. Entirely lacking in class. He could not even dignify the device he had been instructed to use by thinking of it as a weapon.

  In the outside right pocket of his yellow linen jacket was a cylinder of compressed air that so ruined the line of the garment that he had been constrained to fill the left pocket with pebbles just to avoid looking deformed. A prince, even a phony prince, should not have to appear in public as if his tailor had draped him with prêt-à-porter straight off the rack at Galleries Lafayette.

  Less obtrusive but still annoying was the tube that snaked through a hole in the pocket-lining seam up his right sleeve to the . . . instrument he palmed in his right hand.

  He could hardly think of it as a gun. It fired hair-thin projectiles of hardened gel containing a gene-tailored toxin. They felt like insect bites going in, dissolved into the bloodstream, and caused the target to expire of a massive cerebral hemorrhage approximately forty-eight hours later, leaving no chemical signature.

  By Eric’s lights, this was no more a proper hit than the wimpish American practice of dispatching felons with “lethal injections” as if it were some kind of medical procedure, an honest execution.

  “Not only that, Mom, it reminds me of the old Bulgarian umbrella trick that went out with Todor Zhivkov,” he had complained. “Tacky, really tacky.”

  “Whaddya wanna do, Eric, fill him fulla holes with an antique tommy gun and dump da stiff out of a black Citroën in the middle of the Place Maubert?”

  “It would at least make a statement.”

  “You weren’t such a wise guy when you made ya bones, I seem ta remember,” Mom had reminded him, then mercifully dropped out of the Prohibition-gun-moll act, which only she found so amusing. “If memory serves, Prince Charming, your main concern was to keep from shitting in your pants.”

  This had been enough to end the discussion on Mom’s terms, an indulgence she was accustomed to enjoying one way or another, whether speaking on behalf of the syndic or not. Though as Eric remembered it, it hadn’t been fear that had made him reticent so much as a certain moral reluctance that he dimly seemed to remember having had in those days.

  Mom had had the last word then too.

  “Maintaining civilization’s always been a dirty job involving a certain amount of wetwork, kid,” she told him, “and since someone’s got to get rich doing it, it might as well be you.”

  “You’re talking about mur—”

  Mom stopped him with a finger to his lips. “Think of it as an initiation ceremony, think of it as a corporate discorporation,” she advised him. “Of a blue-balled capitalist son of a bitch standing in the way of a sweet deal to liberate the wage slaves of the Appalachian coffee plantations from durance vile and make them citizen-shareholders in a new coca syndic highly sympathetic to the financial interest of all citizen-shareholders in Bad Boys. Think of it as a service to humanity.”

  “Well, uh . . .”

  “Look, Eric, you wanna be a gopher for the Big Boys in Bad Boys all your life, or you want them to make you a prince? Well call them hopeless romantics, but they don’t hand out goodies like that to green kids who won’t prove their seriousness by making their bones.”

  “Well, when you put it that way, Mom . . .”

  She always did have a way of putting it that got him to see things her way, whether by appeal to his romantic idealism or his bottom-line survival instincts, and more often than not by convincing him that with a little imagination he could come to see them as one and the same.

  “Your father had all the survival instincts of a lemming,” she had told him when she finally made their dire situation clear to her callow twenty-one-year-old son. “His way of handling a tight corner was to exit down the toilet bowl, leaving us to negotiate with people who are not in the charitable business of writing off debts to be kind to widows and orphans.”

  Eric Esterhazy’s paternal line had been Balkan hustlers, their modest horse-thieving origins drifting back well into the era of the Emperor Franz Josef in that general area where Hungary, Romania, Poland, and Ukraine interfaced uneasily behind flexible borders that could change Romanians to Hungarians and Poles to Ukrainians any given week and usually did.

  This did not inspire atavistic ethnic loyalties, especially since the family stew contained its measure of Jews and Gypsies, rendering the Esterhazys well prepared for survival in the postnational world.

  During the collapse of Communism, Eric’s grandfather had snake-danced his way out of Romania and into France, where he survived by the usual low-grade scams until the warming turned formerly worthless Carpathian real estate that his father had been conned into accepting to settle an otherwise uncollectable debt into a primo mountainside marijuana plantation.

  So Eric’s father grew up in the swank spots of Europe and Siberia as the rich-kid scion of former refugee scum who had struck it rich, and made an appropriate marriage to an American refugee, a former Floridian, who spoke as little as possible about her previous means of support while adventuring through the high life and low spots of the Green world’s playgrounds.

  Eric, too, enjoyed this palmy lifestyle, until the age of nineteen, when a consortium of Ukrainian wheat syndics got together the financing to purchase a string of cloud-cover generators in an attempt to restore the viability of their farmlands.

  This was moderately successful from the point of view of the Ukrainian wheat syndics, but the usual unforeseen side effects elsewhere, in this case a lowering of the temperature and a return of snowfall to certain parts of the Carpathians, were disastrous to the Esterhazy family fortune.

  Dad’s way of dealing with this altered economic reality was to drink enough booze and do enough drugs—toward the end on credit—to insure that he wouldn’t be around to face the eventual music.

  Leaving Mom and Eric with a small mountain of debt to some less than sympatico people.

  But Mom was a survivor. Mom was not about to give up her lifestyle. Mom had connections. Mom could get a twenty-year-old with no apparent marketable skills work.

  Mom, it turned out when push came to shove, was an honorably inactivated citizen-shareholder in Bad Boys, and with old lovers well placed in the syndic.

  Well placed enough to get her son in.

  Chez Mom, Bad Boys may have been formed by elements of the Russian and Italian mafias, Oriental triads, Colombian and Mexican drug carte
ls, and assorted other less than punctiliously legal operations, but under a righteous syndic charter that not only required that all its enterprises now be legal within the sovereignty in which they were practiced, but that forbade the hiring of wage slaves and granted all Bad Boys operatives down to the lowliest field hand in a coca plantation citizen-shareholder status.

  Bad Boys was no more “Bad” than the “Boys” who ran it were callow adolescents. Indeed, according to possibly apocryphal syndic lore, the name in the original draft of the syndic charter had been “Wild Boys” until a literarily sophisticated citizen-shareholder who had read the twentieth-century novel had pointed out that this had certain undesirable homoerotic references.

  Many Bad Boys enterprises were no shadier than high-risk, high-profit operations that required pocket politicians, legislative adjustments, and forceful persuasion to succeed. Much of the rest involved the marketing of goods and services—produced in small sovereignties where they had been made legal—in major markets where they were not, well, not exactly, well, we wouldn’t be the Bad Boys if we didn’t bend our charter a little when necessary. . . .

  Bad Boys wasn’t some gang ruled by cigar-smoking godfathers or a predatory capitalist corporation owned by cigar-chomping plutocrats; it was a proper syndicalist democracy with a board of directors elected by its citizen-shareholders.

  And, moreover, the syndic was as Green as it got; if they knew how, Bad Boys would turn the whole planet into one big endless tropical summer playground for the enjoyment of everyone, since, after all, most of their profits came from some sort of leisure trade.

  “The godsons of Robin Hood and Jesse James and the Buccaneers, crusading against evil nationalism and revenant capitalism and for this balmy green lifestyle as we would like to continue to know it, now wouldn’t we, Eric?” Mom told him when he seemed less than entirely enthused. “Or maybe you got a better idea, kiddo?”

  Well, this certainly had its romantic appeal to a kid whose alternatives were nothing he cared to contemplate, and so Eric signed the Bad Boys charter, accepted his shares, and began his career at the bottom, gophering for middle management around Europe.

  After a while, no doubt under the prodding of Mom, the powers that be were given to realize that Eric’s family Eurotrash background gave him easy access to certain pretentious circles where they were still considered social pariahs.

  Thus the deal to make him a prince.

  Once he had made his bones, no problem.

  There was hardly a sovereignty in which it was illegal to call yourself a prince, and plenty competing to sell you a title at cut-rate prices. Bread & Circuses handled the launch, and once a staple of the society gossip forums and spa circuit, Prince Eric Esterhazy was a nice name to have fronting a casino in Lille or a whorehouse in Amsterdam.

  Prince Eric strolled with apparently aimless indolence through the bamboo grove, now gaining on Gauldier, now losing ground, now heading toward him, now away, approaching him in an indirect manner, so that the momentary crossing of their trajectories would seem like a random event, both to the target and to any observer who might chance to see the hit.

  Nor was he the only faux boulevardier engaging in this sort of charade on such a sunny afternoon, the Tuileries Bamboo Boudoir being a well-known venue for reasonably priced but not entirely uncomely or tastelessly costumed whores of various genders, promenading about displaying their wares for the custom of an equally varied potential clientele pretending not to be inspecting the merchandise.

  Pierre Gauldier was a known regular in the Bamboo Boudoir, all too well known by those who plied their trade therein as a cheap chiseler who used his position as a prefect in Force Flic to extract freebies, often after the fact of the act. Indeed, the word from the birds was that playing the corrupt cop extorting free fucks in the nearest thicket from honest working girls was the nature of his pervo game.

  The solo entrepreneurs in the Bamboo Boudoir were not citizen-shareholders in Bad Boys, and the relationship between Bad Boys and the Parisian police syndic was in general admirably symbiotic, so in the ordinary course of events dealing with a pest like Pierre Gauldier on their behalf would have been a contract that the syndic would have found it prudent to refuse.

  M. Gauldier, however, had of late taken to the running of similar freelance extortions of funds rather than fucks from certain enterprises, which, though not actual Bad Boys operations—no one was stupid enough to try that—had purchased insurance contracts from the syndic.

  Serendipitously, the whores of the Bamboo Boudoir had gotten up a collection to secure Gauldier’s removal and had offered the contract to Bad Boys at about the same time that Bad Boys had begun remonstrating with Force Flic about his violation of their cozy concordat.

  Relations between Bad Boys and Force Flic being what they were, and this, after all, still being France at least in a cultural sense, the response was a Gallic shrug, and a suggestion that gallantry indeed required Bad Boys to come to the rescue of these Ladies of the Evening in distress. But do not be so obvious about it as to force us to investigate such a public service. Which we would be compelled to do for the sake of our own morale if it appeared that a police official had actually been murdered.

  Thus had Prince Eric Esterhazy been offered the opportunity to do the good deed and been provided with the ridiculous instrument presently distending the drape of his jacket in such an unfortunate manner.

  Contrary to hoary folklore, this had not been an offer he could not refuse. As a citizen-shareholder in Bad Boys, one might enhance one’s career progress and secure large bonuses in return for occasional special services rendered.

  Well, actually one.

  Alas, the time had not yet passed when the removal of certain recalcitrant individuals was essential to the fiduciary health of the syndic cause. But the syndic charter forbade wage employment, and granting citizen-shareholder status to full-time professional killers did not seem like a swift idea.

  Much better to be able to call upon citizen-shareholders engaged in other full-time occupations to perform the occasional special service.

  Once or twice a year at the most, Eric. And you can refuse any contract you feel violates your moral or political principles with no hard feelings, we can always give it to someone who would find it more fulfilling. No more than one hit a year had ever been required of him, and when he turned down the occasional contract on moral or esthetic grounds, there were indeed no unpleasant repercussions.

  So it might fairly be said that because the esthetics of the manner in which he was constrained to fulfill this one left so much to be desired, preventing the dishonorable and odious M. Gauldier from further disturbing the commerce of this fair pleasure garden and the harmonious relationship between Bad Boys and Force Flic would be an act of righteous self-sacrifice.

  Noblesse oblige.

  He was, after all, a prince, was he not?

  MONIQUE CALHOUN TOOK THE ELEVATOR DOWN and strode through the lobby out onto Seawall Avenue, the boulevard atop the dikework that ran around Manhattan, the only real New York, the city she hated to love and loved to hate.

  This, of course, made her a true New Yorker.

  This in itself was part of the attitude.

  Her cramped studio apartment on the eleventh floor of a Seawall Avenue tower might hardly be a candidate for anyone but a New Yorker’s object of affection, but those favored by a crepuscular rendezvous therein, who didn’t have to live there, seldom failed to express their envy.

  For the westward view through the picture window at sunset was heart stoppingly glorious on a good day, the blazing ball of the sun bronzed by the haze over the New Jersey shore as it sank majestically behind the silhouetted filigreed fairyland landscape of the Palisades, painting the sky mauve and purple and orange, turning the Hudson River into a brilliant mirror of rippling light.

  The cold cruel light of morning at seawall level, however, presented a somewhat less romantic vista. The Palisades skyline was starkly rev
ealed as a hodgepodge of factories, apartment blocks, windmills, tank farms, and solar arrays.

  Houseboats, barges, sampans, and fishing boat docks, with their connecting chaotic network of rotting gangways, formed an amoeboid floating favela outside the seawall, spreading five hundred meters and more out across the Hudson along as much of the length of Manhattan as the eye could see. And while from the eleventh floor she didn’t get much of the smell, even with the sun just beginning to steam the aroma off River City, she got a good dose of cookfire smoke and frying fish and better-you-don’t-ask from here.

  If the Paris of her girlhood was favored by fortune and the Lands of the Lost of Monique Calhoun’s guilty professional day-tripping were the victims of the roll of the climatological dice, New York was somehow both Blue and Green and yet neither.

  New York was energized by its perfect winters, the clear blue skies, the tangy air just a shade too warm to be called brisk. New York basked in its golden tropical springs and autumns, when it wasn’t being drenched with their monsoon rains.

  New York broasted in its horrendous summers, when you could fry an egg on the pavement and steam one in the supersaturated air if you could keep the mosquitoes and flies from devouring it first, when orbital mirrors had to burn away the inversion layer every other day to keep the air more or less breathable.

  The swamping of so much of the shorelines of Brooklyn and the Bronx and Long Island might have provided the breeding grounds for vast hordes of mosquitoes, flies, and swamp rats—and alligators and water moccasins and cockroaches the size of cats or so the legends went—but it had also created the habitat for the rich profusion of crabs, lobsters, shrimp, crayfish, catfish, carp, and shellfish which made seafood so cheap locally and had created the aquaculture and fishing industry in which, one way or another, most of the refugees from the Southeast Asian littorals and Pacific islands found gainful employ.