This Other Eden (40 page)

‘Pale
skin reasons! Green eyes reasons! Cute little tits and ass reasons! You wanted
to get laid, didn’t you, Schwartz?’

‘Sir, I
—‘

‘Don’t
argue with me! You saw that you had one chance in your life to pork a really
fuckable piece and you took it. Look at you! You’re disgusting. A deformed,
half-crippled little nerd. When did you last get any? Never, that’s when. What
kind of life is that? Then suddenly you’re chained to some dream pussy. And
I’ll bet she was pushing it out, wasn’t she? Baiting the honey trap? Of course
she was. She knew a contemptible, inadequate piece of shit when she saw one.
You weakened, didn’t you, Schwartz? You followed your nasty little dick and
it’s going to lead you straight to the cage. Now what have you got to say?’

‘I’m
gay, sir.

‘Nothing!
Like I thought…‘ Klaw paused for a moment as the statement sunk in’…
say what?’

‘I’m
gay, sir, what’s more I’ve been legally bound to my husband for twelve years.
We were married in San Francisco. It’s all in my file, sir.’

Klaw
scrolled furiously through Judy’s computer file. To his horror, it turned out
that Judy was right.

‘I
didn’t know we took you guys in the Bureau.’

‘Sir,
the FBI has been legally obliged to employ a representative quota of
homosexuals for over sixty years now.

‘Oh… yeah, I did hear that, actually.’

‘Besides,
sir. Hoover was gay.’

‘That’s
a damn lie!’

Klaw
was rather shaken. He had thought he had Judy’s case all sewn up, and now it
appeared that he would have to think again, something he hated doing. In fact,
he rather disliked even having to think the first time, let alone having to do
it again. It had never occurred to Klaw that Judy was gay, nor had it occurred
to any of Judy’s other colleagues. He never mentioned his private life while
at work, so people just made the usual presumption of heterosexuality. The
bullies who taunted him as a ‘queer’ did so because they were dimwits, not
because they had an astute eye for people’s sexual preferences.

Judy
seized on the moment of Klaw’s confusion to press home his version of events.

‘Ms
Connolly managed to lift my gun, sir. She threatened to shoot both myself and
any bystanders who got in the way. We were in a crowded airport, sir, I thought
it best to accede to her demands.’ Judy was rather hoping that Klaw had heard
no reports of Judy’s shouted allegiance to The Elitest Church of Christ the
Crew-cut. Klaw’s silence suggested that he had not, and Judy felt safe to carry
on with his story. ‘She had people at the airport and I was effectively a
captive of Mother Earth from that point on. They kept me with them in the hope
that they might learn something of Bureau policy towards them from me.’ Judy
paused for a moment and then remarked with casual stoicism, ‘As you can see,
sir, their methods of persuasion were not of the gentlest.’

Klaw
eyed Judy’s wounds. They certainly looked painful.

‘What
did you tell them?’ Klaw inquired.

Judy
tried to look shocked.

‘I am a
Federal Agent, sir. I told them nothing of either our policies or agents. In
fact, they got nothing from me at all.’

Judy
got away with it. Klaw had no proof of wrongdoing, could find no motive, and
the fact that Judy had returned voluntarily did not correspond with the idea
that he had absconded. The Bureau was forced to accept that he had genuinely
been captured in the line of duty. Which meant, to their horror, that they had
to give him a Purple Heart for his wounds. They made it clear in the citation
however that he had utterly disgraced the whole organisation by being captured
by an unarmed woman whilst he had the support of two police officers. Judy, who
had never been popular in the Bureau, was now a marked man. He never ate in the
canteen, never used the toilets and locked any room in which he was working.

The
lonesome trail finally gets warm.

Judy had no time to get
distressed about his ostracism. He cared not one jot for the opinion of the
majority of his colleagues anyway. The cold, lonesome trail which he had been
following for so long was finally beginning to warm up a little. Judy set
himself the task of finding out which adverts had followed which news bulletins
for the last twenty or thirty years. He wanted to know what products were being
pushed when environmental disaster was the top story. Day after day he ploughed
through the records of the broadcasting companies, the copyright libraries and indeed
the FBI itself, which monitored all electronic media.

‘Sounds
absolutely fascinating,’
Judy’s husband Roger said to him, as he dabbed
calamine lotion on to Judy’s swollen eyes the evening after his return to work.
‘Being a secret agent must be just so incredible.’

‘I
can’t really tell you what it’s about, Roger,’ Judy apologised. ‘Can’t tell me
about thirty years of ad breaks? How will I ever get to sleep!’

Chapter
Twenty-Three

The lull before the storm

Tired
and emotional.

Whilst Judy was ferreting
out a truth that would shortly put both Rosalie and Max in mortal danger,
Rosalie had joined her lover at the George V Hotel in Paris. She was in a funny
mood.

‘I want
a holiday,’ she told Max after the laminate had been duly stretched. ‘I want a holiday
a lot.’

‘Cool,’
said Max, who was pretty much on holiday all the time anyway.

‘I’m
tired and I need a rest,’ she said.

‘Anytime
is party time for me, babe. Let’s raise hell.’

‘I said
I need a rest and don’t call me babe,’ said Rosalie. Had she been able to see
into the future, Rosalie might have been even more anxious for a break. The
gift of foresight would have shown her how much more limited her travel options
were soon to become. She could not, however, see into the future. What is more,
she had suddenly become very confused about her past.

‘I
don’t know what I’ve been doing, Max. I look back and it just doesn’t seem to
make any sense.’

‘Welcome
to my world, girl,’ said Max, ‘I feel that way nearly every morning.’

But
Rosalie was crying.

The
toxic waste action had been something of a watershed. It was bad enough, having
one’s first action as a Facilitator degenerate into a massive environmental
disaster, without the FBI popping up in the middle of it all and accusing you
of the most extraordinary and horrendous things. That, coupled with the
revelations that she had heard at Jurgen Thor’s house, had so utterly thrown
Rosalie that her idealism and determination seemed suddenly to have deserted
her. She had been on active service for an unbroken five years and was entitled
to some leave.

It was
to be the lull before the storm.

Language
barrier.

She and Max headed
south-west and took a little room in a small village in Provençe. Its
sweet-smelling linen-covered quilt and little vase of flowers on the
hand-painted dresser reminded both of them of the room in which they had first
consummated their love. It made Rosalie feel a little lighter of heart. Max too
felt good. A European tour with the person you love is something many a young
American has dreamt of, and Max had always wanted to see the real France. He
had found Paris a little snooty. He did not speak French and on a number of
occasions, whilst desperate to get his bearings, he had approached a Parisian
and made the apologetic appeal, ‘Excuse me, but do you speak English?’ only to
be met by the infuriating riposte, ‘Yes, of course. Do you speak French?’

Nothing
irritates the French cultural elite so much as the fact that, because of
American economic hegemony after the Second World War, English became the
dominant world language. The
lingua franca,
as it is called, as if to
add insult to injury. It is a source of constant pain to the educated French
that, but for a couple of unlucky results in the battles of the late eighteenth
century, the United States would have been known as
L’Etats-Unis,
MacDonald’s
would be selling
Grands
Macs and Rock ‘n’ Roll would be known as
Rocher
et Petit Pain.
It is an understandable gripe for which Quebec and New
Caledonia are no consolation at all.

Max had
soon had enough of being patronised for being mono-lingual. His pride stung, he
retreated to his hotel and holed himself up in his room, desperately cramming
the French language. Virtual Reality had of course made learning the basics of
a new language much easier than it had been in the past. It is universally
acknowledged that the best way to learn to speak a foreign tongue is to plunge
in amongst the natives. With a decent Linguafone VR helmet, it was possible to
do just that in an extremely intense manner. Max spent days inside his helmet,
visiting
boulangeries,
ordering
café au lait
and buying bus
tickets over and over again.

A
day in Provençe.

By the time he and Rosalie
headed south, Max was very proud of his new skills and insisted on employing
them to conduct all negotiations.

‘Vous
avez une chambre pour la nuit, avec une salle de bain?’
he said, giving it plenty of Gallic intonation and pantomimic hand
motion. All to no avail, as it happened. Max was a very good actor, but even he
could not mime a bedroom with en suite bathroom. He was met with a blank stare.

‘I’m
awfully sorry,’ the house agent said in a plummy English voice, ‘I’m afraid I
don’t speak French.’

Rather
disappointed, Max was forced to negotiate for their pretty little room in
English.

Having
settled in, and then settled in again in a different position, they set off to
explore the village. It was not as much fun as they had hoped, confined as they
were to hot dusty little BioTubes. Provençe, having long since given up any
pretence at agriculture in order to concentrate on tourism, was not granted the
convenience of orbital sun-screening. Since this meant that strolling outside
was as hot and stuffy as staying inside, Rosalie suggested they drop in
somewhere for a drink. This was an idea which Max never turned down and they
made for a little cockney-style pub called The Dog and Duck.

‘Deux
verres de yin rouge, s’il vous plaît,’
Max said
firmly. Only to be met again with a non-comprehending look.

‘Nobody
speaks French here, Max,’ Rosalie explained. ‘This is Provençe. The whole area
became completely English-speaking over fifty years ago. They even drive on the
left.’ She bought a couple of pints of bitter and they sat together, alone in
the smoky snug.

Decent
proposal.

Max was looking rather
uncomfortable, a bit sheepish. There was something on his mind.

‘What’s
up, Max?’ Rosalie inquired.

‘Oh,
it’s nothing,’ he said. ‘Well, hey, that’s not true, it’s definitely a vibe,
you know, if you think these things are important, which I think I do, it’s a vibe
… I was just wondering if, well, basically, if you would marry me?’

Rosalie
was caught rather off her guard. Her eyes stared and her face coloured to a
deep blush. Green does not, on the whole, go with red, except maybe on apples
and in this case on Rosalie, at least as far as Max was concerned. Staring into
her eyes, Max felt that he had never seen anyone or anything look lovelier.
Feeling rather that his proposal had done little or nothing to reflect the
heart-stopping beauty of its object, Max dropped to one knee and tried again.

‘Rosalie,
I love you. I would lay down my life for you in a heartbeat. Your eyes are like
emeralds and your skin, when you aren’t blushing the way you happen to be now,
is like ivory… with freckles. You care about stuff and your voice is smooth as
Irish cream or something, and you can fight and handle a gun and I love you and
you’ve got to marry me.’ Max paused, then added with a flourish,
‘Je
t’aime.’

‘Lord
Almighty, Max,’ said Rosalie, much taken aback. ‘That’s something to throw at a
girl … You’ll have to give me time to think about it.’

‘Of
course, of course. I understand.’

‘I’ve
thought about it. All right I’ll marry you.’

That
evening, over a celebration meal of traditional Provençal roast beef and
Yorkshire pudding, followed by treacle pudding and custard, they discussed
their wedding plans.

‘Only
close friends,’ said Max firmly. ‘This is going to be a real wedding, not some
Hollywood stunt. We charter only
one
Jumbo sub-orbital. That’s it, the
limit, kapeesh? Two hundred and fifty guests from America, max. It’ll mean
offending some people very dear to me, but I ain’t marrying them, am I? And
no
press!
Just those we invite. Two magazines, two tabloids and any quality
broadsheet that wants the story, obviously. Now, who do you want to do your
dress? I think it would be a nice move if we used a Dublin designer.’