“Why, I’m just fine,” said the handsome, bronzed senior citizen who appeared in the PV. “How nice to see you! I don’t think I know your friends?” he added, peering in a friendly way at Walthers and Yee-xing. If there was an ideal way for a man to appear when he passed a certain age, this was it; he had all his hair and seemed to have all his teeth; his face showed laugh wrinkles at the corners of his eyes but was otherwise Unlined, and his eyes were bright and warm. He acknowledged the introductions politely. Questioned about what he was doing he shrugged modestly. “I’m about to sing the Catulli Carmina with the Wien Staatsoper, you know.” He winked. “The lead soprano is very beautiful, and I think those sexy lyrics have been getting to her in rehearsal.”
“Amazing,” murmured Walthers, gazing at him. But Janie Yee-xing was less enchanted.
“We really don’t want to keep you from your music,” she said politely, “and I’m afraid we’d better get along.”
“They’ll wait,” Rex declared fondly. “They always do.”
Walthers was fascinated. “Tell me,” he said, “when you talk about, ah, companionship in this, ah, state-can you have your choice of any companions you want? Even if they’re still alive?”
The question was aimed at the salesman, but Rex spoke first. He was gazing shrewdly and sympathetically at Walthers. “Anyone at all,” he said, nodding as though they shared a confidence. “Anyone living or dead or imaginary. And, Mr. Walthers, they’ll do anything you want them to!” The figure chuckled. “What I always say,” he added, “is that what you call ‘life’ is really only a sort of entr’acte to the real existence you get here. I just can’t understand why people put it off for so long!”
The Here Afters were, as a matter of fact, one of the little spinoff enterprises that I was fondest of, not because they earned much money. When we discovered that the Heechee had been able to store dead minds in machines a light clicked. Well, says I to my good wife, if they can do it, why can’t we? Well, says my good wife to me, no reason at all, Robin, to be sure, just give me a little time to work out the encoding. I had not made any decision about whether I wanted it done to me, when and if. I was quite sure, though, that I didn’t want it done to Essie, at least not right then, and so I was glad that the bullet had done no more than puff her nose.
Well, somewhat more. It involved us with the Rotterdam police. The uniformed sergeant introduced us to the brigadier, who took us in his big fast car with the lights going to the bureau and offered us coffee. Then Brigadier Zuitz showed us into the office of Inspector Van Der Waal, a great huge woman with old-fashioned contact lenses making her eyes bulge out with sympathy. It was How unpleasant for you, Mijnheer, and I hope your wound is not painful, Mevrouw, as she was leading us up the stairs-stair&-to the office of Commissaris Lutzlek, who was a different kettle of fish altogether. Short. Slim. Fair, with a sweet boy’s face, though he had to be at least fifty to have become a Principal Commissaire. You could imagine him putting his thumb in the dyke and hanging in there forever, if he had to, or until he drowned. But you could not imagine him giving up. “Thank you for coming in about this business in the Stationsplein,” he said, making sure we had seats.
“The accident,” I said.
“No. Regretfully, not an accident. If it had been an accident, it would have been a matter for the municipal police rather than for me. So therefore this inquiry, for which we ask your cooperation.”
I said, to put him in his place, “Our time is pretty valuable to be spent in this sort of thing.”
He was not puttable. “Your life is even more valuable.”
“Oh, come on! One of the soldiers in the parade was doing his twirling act, and he had a round in his gun and it went off.”
“Mijnheer Broadhead,” he said, “first, no soldier had a round in his gun; the guns are without firing pins in any case. Second, the soldiers are not even soldiers; they are college students hired to dress up for parades, just like the guards at Buckingham Palace. Third, the shot did not come from the parade.”
“How do you know?”
“Because the gun has been found.” He looked very angry. “In a police locker! This is quite embarrassing to me, Mijnheer, as you can imagine. There were many extra policemen for the parade, and they used a portable dressing-room van. The ‘policeman’ who fired the weapon was a stranger to others in the unit, but then they were drawn from many detachments. Come to clean up after the parade, he dressed quickly and left, with his locker open. There was nothing in it but the uniform- stolen, I suppose—and the gun, and a picture of you. Not of Mevrouw. Of you.”
He sat back and waited. The sweet boy’s face was peaceful.
I was not. It takes a minute to sink in, the announcement that somebody has the fixed intention of killing you. It was scary. Not just being killed; that’s scary by definition, and I can testify to how scared I can get when it looks like death is near, out of unforgotten and even repeated experience. But murder is worse than ordinary death. I said, “You know how that makes me feel? Guilty! I mean, I must have done something that really made somebody hate me.”
“Exactly so, Mijnheer Broadhead. What do you suppose it could have been?”
“I have no idea. If you find the man, I suppose you can find the reason. That shouldn’t be too hard-there must be fingerprints or something? I saw news cameras, perhaps there’s even a picture of him on somebody’s film-“
He sighed. “Mijnheer, please do not tell me how to conduct police routine. All those things are of course being followed up, plus depth interviews with everyone who might have seen the man, plus sweat analysis of the clothes, plus all other means of identification. I am assuming this man was a professional, and therefore those means will not succeed. So we approach it from the other direction. Who are your enemies, and what are you doing in Rotterdam?”
“I don’t think I have any enemies. Business rivals, maybe, but they don’t assassinate people.”
He waited patiently, so I added, “As to what I’m doing in Rotterdam, I think that’s quite well known. My business interests include some share in the exploitation of some Heechee artifacts.”
“This is known,” he said, not quite so patient.
I shrugged. “So I am a party in a suit at the International Palace of Justice.”
The commissaris opened one of his desk drawers, peered inside, and slammed it again moodily. “Mijnheer Broadhead,” he said, “you have had many meetings here in Rotterdam not connected with this suit, but instead with the question of terrorism. You wish it stopped.”
“We all want that,” I said, but the feeling in my belly was not just my degenerating pipes. I had thought I was being very secretive.
“We all want it, but you are doing something about it, Mijnheer. Therefore I believe you now do have enemies. The enemies of us all. The terrorists.” He stood up and offered us the door. “So while you are in my jurisdiction I will see that you have police protection. After that, I can only urge caution, for I believe you are in danger from them.”
“Everybody is,” I said.
“Everybody is at random, yes. But you are now a particular case.”
Our hotel had been built in the palmy days, for big-spending tourists and the jet-set rich. The best suites were decorated for their tastes. Not always for ours. Neither Essie nor I was into straw mats and wood-block pillows, but the management moved all that out and moved in the right kind of bed. Round and huge. I was looking forward to getting a lot of use out of it. Not so much use out of the lobby, which was a kind of architecture I hated: cantilevered walkways, more fountains than Versailles, so many mirrors that when you looked up you thought you were in outer space. Through the good offices of the commissaris, or anyway of the young cop he sent to escort us home, we were spared that. We were whisked through a service entrance, up a padded elevator that smelled of room-service food, to our own landing, where there had been a change in the decoration. Just across from our suite door there was a marble Winged Venus in the stairwell. Now it had a companion in a blue suit, a perfectly ordinary-looking man, studiously not meeting my eye. I looked at the cop escorting us. She grinned in embarrassment, nodded to her colleague in the stairwell, and closed the door behind us.