Thirteen Read online

  After that they quickly came to agreement.

  8—the kiss of the temptress

  Moving Lumino, duration: 51 seconds, 1920.

  Description: A naked man and woman kissing each other passionately, then falling panting on the eiderdown mattress, whereupon the man blows out the light.

  Jean-Pierre, 27 years old:

  Jean-Pierre threw the lumino back on the table, and the fragile glass plate broke in two. Both halves were still showing him and the lovely Gala, kissing. "Did you hire a detective for that? To spy on my girlfriends? I’m not fucking married to you, Frédérique!"

  Even in his rage he didn’t forget to call me Frédérique, Frieda thought. Perhaps there is still hope for us.

  "No, of course not. But it is of the utmost importance that the outside world believes in our marriage. Must I spell it out for you? I am your wife, and I bore you two boys. Thanks to our father, Pascal and Emile could very well be our kids. Lots of overlap in the genetics. Yeah? Are you following me so far?

  "Now, Shan-Pier, who is still very much wanted for stealing trade secrets, well, there is no way he could have fathered those kids. At that time he was somewhere in the Far East, fondling quite other women." She clicked her tongue, and her voice became a little less shrill. "Also, Pascal and Emile believe we are their loving parents. Please let them keep that illusion for a little longer. After all, they are our brothers. Our own flesh and blood, even if they aren’t our kids."

  Jean-Pierre raised his hands. "Good, good. You’re right. I will be more discreet the next time."

  "It’s a little too late for discretion. Your girlfriend Gala, my detective was shadowing her, not you. Gala Semmelweisss works as an informer for the Trading Company. Works: she would never bed a man just for fun. She is an invert, a lesbian."

  "Wiersma’s clogs! We are hip deep in pig shit."

  "No more Jean-Pierre and Frédérique. Do you remember Chimu, our devout spy? He offered us political asylum." She glanced at the wall clock. "The next Aztec airship leaves in an hour. Plenty of time. I have already sent the children with our governess. Once we are in the air, no gardist can touch us. A flying airship has the same status as an embassy. Aztec ground. Inviolable."

  "What about our money? Are we broke?"

  "No, and we can also thank Chimu for that. He pointed out that the Transatlantic Nerve Cord came on-line last Friday. Capital can now cross the Atlantic as fast as a nerve impulse. For the last ten years money hasn’t been gold, anyway, just account numbers, passwords. The moment we ascend, a friend of Chimu will send a coded tel-audio message to our bank. Moving three-quarters of our money to a secret account on the Aztec State Bank."

  "Frederique, you’re a genius!"

  "That’s why you need me. Now, the next time, think before you kiss, yes?"

  10—50,000 ducats reward!

  Glitter-scale pattern on the wing case of a genetically engineered cockroach, #116 of a brood of 15,000, 1920.

  Description: Portrait of a scowling man on the left wing case, the text in capitals on the right.

  Justin grabbed the struggling cockroach between its hind legs and looked at the portrait. It was no bigger than a postage stamp.

  "Ugly mug that rascal got," Justin opined.

  "That is logical," said his friend. "Otherwise he would never have stolen those secrets. If you are evil it shows on your face. Come on now, keep spreading those vermin. There are ten thousand cockroaches more to go."

  "Let me just read the message, Hank. We have been sowing for two hours, and we don’t even know what is on our cockroaches." He peered at the wing case. "Fifty thousand ducats reward!

  Wanted, dead or alive: Shan-Pier Memling, alias Jean-Pierre Marmolin. This mis . . . mis-cre-ant is urgently wanted for the theft and the sale of trade secrets. More information at your local sheriff. " He flipped the cockroach at a pile of rice bags, and the insect promptly disappeared into a dark gap. "Why are we spreading those critters anyway? Other times they want us to use poison-grain or spray the rice bags to get rid of them roaches."

  "The foreman told us all that. Don’t you ever listen? This here, it is the biggest harbor of all Greater Amsterdam. The ships, they sail all over the world. And because these roaches are all pregnant females, brimful of eggs, you can soon read roaches all over the world. From Shanghai to Reykjavik." He shook his head. "That Shan-Pier doesn’t stand a chance."

  "Too bad. All those fat merchants are like ticks, sucking the blood of honest porters like us. It would be funny if they were bitten themselves, for once."

  "Don’t talk like a stupid Inca! You sure wouldn’t want to live in Tuwantinsuya. Now take a handful of those wrigglers and spread the creepy-crawlers."

  11—furious man, cursing his sad lot

  Aztec cartoon, executed in red ocher, volcanic ash and powdered serpentine, 1920.

  Description: With some effort one can recognize an European male with a raised fist and a grinning Aztec in this very amateurish executed sand painting.

  Note: This kind of sand painting is usually made to thank the gods for the successful completion of an exceptionally good practical joke.

  Shan-Pier, 27 years old:

  Bio-Baroque had run riot in Tenochtitlan, Pier saw the moment they debarked. The Aztec capital had been transformed into a jungle full of the most garish colors. Shocking pink vines climbed the steps of the temples, waving their orchids from the top of the nightmare statues, shaking pollen on the heads of pedestrians. The road itself was alive: a pavement of sturdy crocodile scales on an inch-thick substrate of living flesh. Also, it was election time: at each street-corner toucans screeched propaganda songs, praising various warlords or high priests. Gibbons were strewing sugar hearts and chocolate skulls.

  "By now the Company knows exactly where we are," said Frieda. "The emperor personally granted us asylum. We might as well call us again Pier and Frieda. "

  "Especially now the French are less than popular," Pier nodded. "What was de Gaulle thinking of when ordered to board that freighter? Mayans may be entering Marseilles illegally, everyone knows they are good workers." He halted at the next intersection "There, those statues of ladies with a gaping hole in their ribcage, that must be the Avenue of the Heartless Maidens."

  Frieda looked at her own map. "Yes, turn to the left, and then the third entrance should be the State Bank."

  A marble plate supported on two living elephant legs formed the counter. The legs were not of the highest quality, Pier noticed: they trembled incessantly.

  The clerk offered Pier the tentacle of a tel-audio connection. "Enter your secret code. As soon as I get confirmation, you can withdraw ducats to your heart’s content."

  Pier pressed the suction cups against his temples: nerve fibers rapidly grew through his skull bones, drilled into his frontal lobes.

  "State Bank of the Aztec Federation," a flat voice said directly into Pier’s head. "Your authentication code, please." No doubt they meant password.

  "Nine gulls laughing: do I hear scorn in their voices?" The code specified by Chimu sounded like a mangled haiku, and probably it was. The Nipponese had all the best codes.

  "Authentication code is incorrect."

  Wiersma’s clogs! Did I use the wrong number of gulls? "Eight gulls laughing?"

  "The given code is incorrect. For your information, an authentication code consists of eight digits followed by the name of a recognized god or demon."

  "That can’t be! Chimu . . ." He pulled the suction cups loose, winced when the nerve fibers tore. "Chimu cheated us. The code he gave us is pure nonsense. Gobbledygook"

  "Can I do something else for you?" the clerk asked.

  12—registration #475: home of public

  enemy s. memling in tenochtitlan

  Chromatophores on a living octopus skin. The images are originally taken by a hidden spy-eye, duration: 54 minutes, 1926.

  Description: A jerky series of pictures showing a boy leaving a painted adobe building, followed twent
y minutes later by public enemy S. Memling. Public enemy S. Memling is wearing a chameleon cloak as a disguise. The spy-eye first moves in on his shadow and then switches to a different wavelength until public enemy S. Memling becomes visible again.

  Shan-Pier, 33 years old:

  "This is the purest llama dung!" Emile grumbled. "Back home in Amelisweerd we lived in a mansion with twenty rooms. Servants everywhere. Flamingos dancing all over the garden." He snorted. "This dump has only eight tiny rooms and then I am including the kitchen! Every time we move the house gets smaller!"

  "Most Dutch children don’t even have their own room," said Frieda. "When Pier and I—"

  "Normal children do. All the children from my school."

  "We were invited by the emperor. Refugees can’t make demands. Frieda and I don’t have a penny to our name. We sleep on borrowed mattresses, eat the bread of charity." Pier spread his hands, and suddenly he saw himself for the pathetic figure he had become. A once reckless and romantic rogue who now bleated about stuyvers and the price of rye bread.

  "And the International School sucks!" Emile added. "They even accept Inuits." He turned and stomped out, even though that was very hard to do on felt slippers.

  "It isn’t exactly easy for the twins," Pier sighed. "All the other children, their parents are diplomats, wholesalers in guinea pigs, the incarnation of goddesses."

  "And this is the moment you’ll start whining about all that money we left behind." Frieda said. "It is still madness. Here at least we are free."

  "A quarter of all our money," Pier muttered, and it was obvious that he was just talking to himself. "Half a million ducats. And it was in numbered accounts. No way the Company could know the passwords."

  "Stop it. Just stop it!"

  13—Judge vanderloo cuts the gordian knot of doubt!

  Sketch by a journalist, Chinese oil

  chalk on gray cardboard, 1927.

  Description: Judge Vanderloo cuts the Knot of Doubt with his Sword of Righteousness. In the background the accused is depicted, wringing his hands in despair and remorse.

  Shan-Pier, 34 years old:

  "It is a great mystery to me why this investigation had to take thirteen months," judge Vanderloo said. "A leprous, one-legged camel trudges more quickly through quicksand." He drew his sword. "No, the guilt of this Memling, may he be called Pier or Pierre, to me it is as clear as daylight." He strode to the Knot of Doubt. It was a tangle as wide as a prize pumpkin, made from excuse cords with extenuating circumstances, humanitarian pamphlets, dried cockroaches with Pier’s face and yellowed bank statements. "This is not the moment to hesitate!" Vanderloo roared. "Only the highest possible punishment will serve for this traitor!" His sword whistled down and cut the knot.

  "Ninety years of hard labor," judge Vanderloo sentenced. "And may this serve as a warning to other rats still thinking of biting the hand that feeds them so generously. The Trading Company is not to be mocked."

  14—the wedding

  Moving lumino, duration: 4 hours 23 minutes, a censorship stamp in upper left corner, 1932.

  Description: A wedding ceremony in the traditional Inuit style. After the groom has wrestled with the polar bear and his bride has bound his wounds, the lovers retreat to a whale-hide tent. The guests sit outside, drumming on pots and rattling pans to encourage them.

  Shan-Pier, 39 years old:

  On the boulder the lumino kept repeating itself, a miniature theater whose players now looked to him as strange and mythological as elves. Pier had almost forgotten how to read, and he had to trace the lines of Frieda’s letter with a black-mooned fingernail.

  "Next month our Emile will depart to Greenland with his Ushi. These two have such big plans! Orca races are all the rage there, and trainers can just about write their own paychecks. I told you before how much fun Emile had, sporting with all those huge sea-mammals: no doubt the salty Dutch blood bubbling up!"

  He shifted his gaze to the final paragraph. "When Umiak asked me to marry him, I immediately agreed. As an uncle of Utshi he had been around so often, helping us, a true friend of the family, and it seemed so natural, so logical a step to invite him into my bed."

  Pier squeezed his eyes tightly, clenched his fists.

  How ridiculous to feel jealous now! Frieda is my sister. She was never my wife. Our marriage was just a trick, a needful lie.

  Often his former life seemed to him like a story: a sparkling Arabian Nights tale which he had never really lived.

  The horn sounded, signaling the end of their pause, and Pier pulled himself to his feet, almost relieved. His arms were nut-brown, as muscular as a blacksmith’s. He took up his pick, trudged down the road they were cutting in the living rock of the mountainside.

  In any case, the sky of La Palma was always blue, he mused, and it grew never cold. It certainly beats picking turnips and munched carrots from a stretch of a frozen railroad.

  After the first four strokes he forgot the whole letter and joined the other convicts in their song:

  "We pulverize the stone,

  breaking rock and mountain!

  Remember, you good man

  before you despise us,

  without our labor

  this wide avenue

  would still be a goat’s path!"

  The pickax rose and fell almost on his own account, an inalienable part of Pier now. Like the rock, the smell of dust. As the poet P.L. Bounders declared:

  Blessed is the workman,

  doing his job,

  with only the sea breeze

  blowing through a perfectly empty head!

  15—greetings from santa cruz

  Postcard, silk-screened on crushed bay leaf, 1938.

  Description: A Dutch sailor who raises a tankard of black beer, surrounded by scantily clad guanchen girls.

  Text on the back:

  "Dear Marieta, the next Saturday you’ll see me again.

  As you can see, this is not some pleasure trip, but hard work.

  I love you,

  Joris Vanderloo."

  Shan-Pier, 45 years old:

  "I know who you are, judge Vanderloo," Pier said. "You look like you haven’t aged a day since you sentenced me."

  "You have Shan-Pier. You’re forty-five, and one would take you for eighty-five. At best. You cough like you are spraying the lining of your lungs around. One foot in the grave, eh?"

  "Well," Pier said, "this work is not exactly healthy. It is that grit, the dust. Lung rot and avalanches: it eats workers like me." He scratched at his beard. "What are you doing here, anyway? Came to gloat, eying the victims of your miscarriages of justice? "

  "That is always amusing. No. I want to make you a proposal. I heal you, make you thirty years old again, or twenty if you insist."

  "Cut the crap. I am worn out. Each and every bone is crumbling. You heard me coughing. My alveoli are just pockets stuffed with grit."

  "Our healers have grown so much more clever in recent years. They can reset the clock in your cells. White hair grows gray, then black as pitch. Your bones re-knit themselves, wrinkles smooth out. If you pay them enough."

  "What should I do? Blow up the High Lords Seventeen in their council chamber?"

  "No, nothing treasonable this time. Just the opposite. You get the chance to set things right. Become a respectable citizen of our great community again."

  "Tell me."

  "It’s about Spitsbergen. Svalbard as they call it themselves. The Inuit just ordered us to evacuate Smeerenburg, to stop whaling. They have some kind of secret army. Pax Viridi, the Green Peace."

  "And?"

  "The leader of those terrorists is a bloody foreigner, not even a real Inuit. Your very own son Emile. Join them. Spy on them. Ensure that they fail. That all their actions sputter out like wet fireworks. You’re his father. No one knows him better."

  "This morning I was pissing blood. I coughed and shook for fifteen minutes before I could roll from my pallet. I will do what you ask." Pier lifted a finger.
"Hey, hey . . . I remember you. From long before my trial. You signed me on. You were the man who recruited a thirteen-year-old boy. One who could barely read so he didn’t see the difference between a five and a thirty year contract."

  Vanderloo shrugged. "You might be right. I don’t remember every mud-lark and street-boy I gave a life."

  16—we are happy to welcome a new member of the family!

  Lumino with a gold-leaf edge and trimmed with snow hare fur, 1939.

  Description: A baby reaches for a mobile made of shark teeth. Top left the text: It is with great joy that we announce the birth of Usmuaq Emilesson, son of Emile Memling and Utshi Ersisdottir.

  A red stamp across the address declares: undeliverable. receiver deceased.

  17—subject 45-9876

  Double lumino, view-protected: only shows text and images after the correct fingerprint, 1939.

  Description: To the left the portrait of an elderly man. On the right a young man who, because of the similarity in facial features, must belong to the same family.

  A note in the scratchy handwriting so characteristic of healers: Extension of telomeres, replacement of bone marrow, lung lavage, controlled oncogenesis.

  Rejuvenation prospects: Successful but unstable: general collapse of immune system expected within eight months.

  Dieter van Huskens, 46 years old:

  The Russian icebreaker had steamed blithely past Smeerenburg and only moored at the Temple of Sedna. A gray dome of dingy gull feathers and walrus ribs rose at the edge of the shingle beach. The breeze from the direction of the land was freezing, Dieter noted with a certain pleasure, the breath of glaciers, full of dancing snowflakes.

  "You’re the only one who gets off here," said the mate. "Now, I hope you like freezing your butt."

  "They are expecting me. No doubt they’ll have a nice coal fire going."

  "Dieter van Huskens." While Pier walked down the gangway, he kept repeating his new name. "Dieter van Huskens." He surreptitiously stroked the side of his shirt, rubbing the velvet of his pants between fingers suddenly without a trace of callus. So nice be decently clad for once, to no longer walk in rags.