“Isn’t this whole meal amazing?” I asked, switching the subject. “I think I’ve had most of these dishes at one time or another, but not all at once, and when I have had this stuff it has rarely been with all authentic ingredients. And the fact that they could serve this all at once implies that they must have had all these ingredients just sitting back there in the kitchen waiting. Imagine being able to just do that.”
She grinned at me. “Well, speaking of being able to just do things, our salaries are going way up. We can probably do this for anniversaries or something.”
“It’s a deal,” I said, recognizing the request for what it was. “Of course after a while there may be problems getting a sitter—”
Helen snorted with laughter. “Geoffrey Iphwin is offering us a chance to work on an extremely challenging and interesting project. I don’t plan on getting knocked up right away, my dearest, so if you’re hoping to get the project all to yourself that way, well, hope for something else. I’m not going to spend what could easily be the most exciting months of my intellectual life waddling around and throwing up.”
“We can wait as long as you want to,” I said.
There was a stir up front. It sounded like the typical situation—a German tourist from some backwater planned-development town in the New East, who has decided he wants to get a bite to eat, and hasn’t the foggiest idea that he is trying to barge into one of the most exclusive restaurants on the planet. The maitre d’ was shouting, “Sir, sir!”
The fat man, galumphing along in his sandals, knee socks, baggy red shorts, and sweat-stained formerly white safari shirt, was headed up the aisle right toward us. Behind him, I saw a German officer, in one of those black uniforms with all the metal decorations around the shoulder, standing up and giving a firm order, the sort that most Germans, in the army or not, obey instantly.
To my surprise, the German tourist ignored him. He kept coming. He looked around, then right at me, smiled in a way that froze my blood, and pulled a small pistol from the bulging lower left pocket of the safari shirt. I stared at it; owing to the policies the Reichs enforce on their trading partners, most of the world is disarmed these days and I’m not sure I had even seen a pistol since leaving the Navy.
He brought the pistol up.
He was still staring right at me. He pulled the trigger and I felt the pressure wave from the bullet as it passed my right ear.
Something made me roll toward that ear and dive under the table. Everyone was screaming. I had made the right choice, because when he adjusted his aim to my left, he missed by a wider margin. From under the table I saw a bullet hole appear in the Mondrian, and some stupid distracted part of my brain realized that, whatever might happen next, I would now be forever part of one of the legends of the Curious Monkey.
I expected the tablecloth to flip up and my last sight in this life to be the German and his pistol a scant yard away. I hugged the floor and shut my eyes.
I heard three deep booms, one after the other, and a scream. Still not thinking very clearly, I poked my head out from under the white tablecloth just in time to see Helen take her fourth shot. I learned later that she had shattered his gun shoulder with her first shot, broken his leg with the second, and put one into his back when he fell forward. Now she calmly walked forward, stood over him, pointed that huge pistol at the back of his head, and, in the horrified silence that filled the Curious Monkey, she watched him for a long second until she saw him twitch; she fired a shot that put brains and blood all over the floor and seemed to make the walls of the Curious Monkey ring.
She scanned the room, standing braced in letter-perfect position, much better than I had ever learned to do it in the Navy, with a two-handed grip on the big chunk of blue-black iron; whatever caliber it was, it was a hell of a lot more than my would-be murderer had had.
Her face had a nearly blank expression of relentless attention, the like of which I had seen on the face of a racing pilot about to execute a tight turn around a pylon. Her jaw was set but not clenched, eyes narrowed slightly, mouth a flat line; you could have projected a laser beam backward through the barrel of that gun and it would have just touched the bridge of her nose parallel with her pupils. Her arms were tense, and the sleeveless long gown showed that she had a lot more muscle than I remembered; I saw her breathe, hold, decide there were no more targets, and only then decide not to fire again. She set the safety on the pistol and set it gently on the table, then calmly reached into her purse, pulled out her phone, and called the police. “This is international police badge oh four alpha india four seven eight bravo one zero. I’m at the Curious Monkey and I’ve got Interpol codes nineteen, forty-three, and sixty-eight here. Situation is under control, but you need to get a four one four, a seventy-eight, and a Foxtrot Mike Whiskey over here, right now.”
I had no idea where she had learned to shoot, or when. Enzy is relatively backward about women’s issues and still doesn’t allow women in combat, and handguns were illegal outside of the military—she couldn’t even have learned in a private club. I lurched up beside the table, slightly messed by the spill of some expensive root beer onto one trouser leg, which I hoped would provide some camouflage for the wet spot I had made on the front of my pants. I was scared more than I’d ever been in my life, but otherwise all right. And how had Helen come to know international police codes as well as a cop? How did a professor of history carry an Interpol badge?
The horrified maitre d’hôtel was just rushing up to our table, but Helen said to him, “I am terribly sorry about this and I deeply regret disturbing everyone’s dinner. We had just finished ours and we’ll go as soon as the police get our statements and decide whether or not to arrest me.” She went back to talking to the police on the phone; apparently they were so unused to being called to the Curious Monkey that they didn’t immediately know where it was.
I looked from Helen to the maitre d’hôtel, and something caught the corner of my eye, causing me to glance back. The German tourist was lying there, face down, a great gaping hole in his lower back, his right arm at an unnatural angle where his shoulder had been shattered, blood pouring out of one pant leg, head smashed like a gourd hit with a bat. I smelled blood and some other unidentified stench—perhaps feces?—under the burnt odor of the thin cloud of blue smoke that still hung in the air, and I was sick to my stomach. I turned away, not wanting to see the sight, and drew great gasps of air, trying to hang on to the most expensive dinner I had ever eaten, tears of stress and terror leaking out of my eyes.
Helen went right on talking on the phone, brushing escaping strands of hair out of her face with her free hand, as calmly as if she were working out a schedule conflict between her classes or placing a complicated catalog order. “If you can get a coroner to run a full spectrum of drug samples from the blood on the victim, right now while everything is fresh and runny, I know my employers will really appreciate it—yeah, exactly. Look, I know you have to arrest me and take me downtown. I know it’s nothing personal. Just make sure you get some authority on the line pretty fast and that they call Iphwin and Diego Garcia for confirmation, because while I’m sure you’ve got one of the nicer jails I’m ever going to stay in, my fiancé is springing for a hell of a good room at the Royal Saigon, and that’s where I’d rather spend my engagement celebration. Yeah, he’s with me, and a witness, so I guess you’ll have to take us both along—sure thing...” She sagged and seemed to be suddenly confused. “Who is this? What? I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She hung up and dropped the phone into her purse, then looked at the body, looked at me in an expression of bewildered terror, and said, “What are you doing alive? There’s not a scratch on you.”