All the Lives He Led-A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

insurance. You needed it to protect your dear ones, the ad said coaxingly, and whose dear ones needed protection more than mine?
    It was tempting. The more I thought about it the more it seemed to me that Pompeii had everything going for it, except one thing. When I checked they flatly refused to assume the remaining €7,000 on my Indenture. They said the term they would need me for was only the one season and they didn’t think I could work the whole debt off in that time.
    I fixed that, though. I let them make the Indenture even bigger—a thousand euros bigger—so if I didn’t earn out at the Jubilee they could sell me to somebody else when the season was over. When I also put up another thousand out of my privately acquired funds, they grudgingly took me on. I was on my way out of the country in forty-eight hours. I was pretty sure that would be well before the Egyptian tax people might catch up on their double-entry bookkeeping and discover the rather significant discrepancy between the amounts of money I’d been observed to spend or send home and the considerably smaller sums I could have earned legitimately as a guide.
    Then, when I was turning in my keys and IDs to the chief of Security, Fazim Ineverdidgethislastname, he gave me a scare. He studied my file for a long time, and then looked up and gave me his false-toothed grin. “Hah,” he said, and, “Ah.” I thought he was thinking about arresting me for God-knows-what, but he was just having fun. “So this change is for out of frying pan into fire, is that how you speak of such things? Is danger attracting to you?”
    I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then he told me about the thing that had happened that morning in the Vatican. The truck that blew up in St. Peter’s Square was driven by a member of the group that called themselves True Original Child of Christ Catholics, and what they were protesting was the ordination of married bishops. Their bomb was a pretty nasty one, too. They had wrapped twenty or thirty kilograms of chemical explosive with ten times as much of whatever radionuclides they could get. Most of that side of the basilica wasn’t going to be useful for a long time.
    But Fazim finally got tired of his jokes, and stamped my exit visa, and I was on my way.

3
    BUON GIORNO, BELLA ITALIA
    I couldn’t afford airfare, so I had to take a surface ship to Italy. I didn’t mind. I was happy to see the gangplanks go down and the ship begin to chug its way out of the Alexandria harbor, en route to Naples.
    The vessel that took me out of harm’s way had once been a cruise ship called La Bella Donna di Palermo , back in the days when things like cruise ships still sailed on the world’s oceans. It was way better than the four-decker that had brought me to Egypt, though the Bella Donna , like all those old local cruise ships, wasn’t very luxurious anymore. It wasn’t very full, either. Near as I could tell there were maybe two hundred or so of us aboard, Ghanians and Sudanese, Palestinians and Tibetans, Cambodians and Tierra del Fuegans. And Americans. Male Americans and female ones. Young and old. The one thing we had in common was that we were all poor, well, that plus the fact that nearly all of us spoke some kind of English.
    That was a hangover from the days when the US of A still amounted to something in the world. I guess the reason the language survived all the troubles was that Argentinians and Japanese always needed a way to talk to Moroccans and Finns. What with aviation lingo and the American troops that had once been stationed all over the place, the English language filled the bill.
    My father had a joke about that. He used to say our language was the last thing of ours that anyone in the rest of the world had ever wanted, and if we’d only had the sense to charge them some kind of a license fee for using it we could all be living on the profits. Jokes about money were about the only kind of jokes my father made anymore.