The Caryatids

EPILOGUE

WHEN INKE ZWEIG HEARD of the burial plans for her husband’s de­ceased mother, she sensed that such arrangements could not possibly end well. Inke had been to a host of funerals. She had hated every one of them. Every celebration of death permanently drained Inke of some spark of her own life force.

Inke envied the dead at funerals—since the dead didn’t have to en­dure the poorly arranged conclusions to difficult modern lives. The lack of any decent and comforting ceremony was the signature of a world in a near-fatal moral confusion.

What were the so-called Acquis and the sinister Dispensation? How had they vulgarly elbowed their way to the forefront of modern life? Why were people so anxious nowadays to pile on proofs of the stricken mourning on their electronic networks? As if the modern dead had no parents, no cousins, no children, no parishioners, no friends next door, no ties of citizenship. Instead there would be vulgar gold-wrapped bou­quets from distant Moscow, remote-control acquaintances burning heaps of Chinese paper cash for the departed on live video links above the coffin… A globalized travesty.

Inke begged George to allow her to stay quietly with the children in Vi­enna. But, as was his method now—George began piling on all kinds of poorly linked “reasons” to sway her. George had become the addict of some new game he called a “correlation engine,” and, since it had caused his business to prosper, he had begun to rely on it in his personal life.

She should see Mljet, George argued, for it was his birthplace and also remarkably beautiful. There was money to be made on the island. John Montgomery Montalban, his firm’s biggest business partner, was coordinating the funeral. The great man would certainly take things amiss if Inke did not show up.

All the sisters—Vera, Radmila, Sonja, even Biserka, the crazy one—they had all agreed to come see their mother buried. Inke had always nagged him (as George put it) about meeting all of his sisters. Here, at last, was the golden chance that she should not forgo.

The sisters were asking for her by name. They were also asking to see the three children. It was unthinkable that she not go to the funeral. She had to go.

None of this bullying convinced Inke. It only made her sense of a gath­ering catastrophe more gloomy and keen. These four harsh, implacable women, so tall, statuesque, blond, and icily identical—they all had high brainy foreheads, big beaky noses, and big flat cheekbones, like the fe­male statues supporting Vienna’s Austrian Parliament building—had they really agreed to step from their four separated pedestals? To really meet with one another, in the flesh? To eat at the same funeral wake, to talk together in public, as if they were women instead of demigoddesses?

They would claw each other’s eyes out. There would be nothing left of them.

It had taken Inke years just to learn to manage George. George was the manageable one of the group—and George had a streak of true fe­rocity in his soul. George was cunning and devoid of scruples.

When she’d first met George, he’d been a teenage illegal laboring in her father’s river shipyard, sleeping in there, probably eating the wharf rats. George scared her, yet he had a genius for putting the workshop in order. Her family’s fortunes were collapsing and the world was violently spinning out of control. Inke had sensed that George might be capable of protecting her during the coming Dark Age. At least, he often darkly spoke of such necessities.

It would certainly take someone like George to protect her, in that murky world of slaughter that awaited everyone in the future: the seas ris­ing, the poles melting, coral reefs turning to foul brown ooze, droughts, floods, fires, plagues, storms the size of Mexico: nothing was safe any­more. Nothing was sure, nothing was decent. Her world was horribly transformed, and this man who seemed to want her so much: he was also different, and somehow, in much the same way as the world.

She was just a common Viennese girl, round, brown, small, not the prettiest, no man ever looked twice, no one but George was fiercely de­manding her hand, her heart, her soul. Since anything could happen to a girl whose father was ill, Inke had given in to him.

In the years that followed that fateful choice of hers, people had in­deed died in unparalleled numbers and in awful, tragic circumstances, a terrible business, the whole Earth in disaster, a true calamity, a global crisis, enough to make any normal, decent woman tremble like a dry leaf and tear out her hair in handfuls…

Yet not all that many people had died in Vienna. As George rightly pointed out—George always had an eye out for the main chance—life in Vienna was rather good.

Because—as George said—the world couldn’t possibly fall apart, all over, at the same speed, at the same moment. There simply had to be lags, holes, exceptions, safe spots, and blackspots—even if it was nothing more than a snug attic room where Inke could curl up with a good Jane Austen novel.

Even when the whole Earth was literally bathed in a stellar blast straight from the surface of the sun itself… an insane idea as awful as the black dreams of some of her favorite book authors, Edgar Poe and Howard Lovecraft—even in a natural catastrophe literally ten times big­ger than the whole Earth, there were some people on Earth who hadn’t much noticed it. They couldn’t be bothered.

The passing years had taught Inke to count her blessings, rather than the innumerable threats to her well-being. She had three loving chil­dren, a handsome home, a relatively faithful husband. In the past few months—as his sisters had all collapsed, one by one, into abject puddles of misery—George was becoming a pillar of the global business com­munity. George had been traveling the world, mixing with much better company than usual. He was better dressed, better spoken, suave, and self-contained. George had matured.

The death of his mother had been a particular tonic for George. Sud­denly he was calling her “Mother.” There were handsome new gifts for Inke, and, when George was at home, he was markedly kind and atten­tive. Even the children noticed George’s improved behavior. The chil­dren had always adored George, especially when he was at his worst.

“You only have to bury a mother once,” George coaxed, “it’s not like I’m asking you to bury my damnable sisters.” This was a typical fib on his part because, in all truth, his mother and his sisters were cloned bananas from the same stem. Inke held her tongue about that, though. Everybody knew the truth, of course: the Mihajlovic brood were the worst-kept “se­cret” scandal in history. Everyone who loved them learned not to say any­thing in earshot.

Then George further announced that his mother’s burial was to be a traditional Catholic ceremony. Not the kind of ceremony George pre­ferred: those newfangled Dispensational Catholic ceremonies, with ubiq­uitous computing inside the church. No: George was firmly resolved on proper committal rites, with a vigil, a Mass, and a wake. Conducted in Latin. The Latin was the final straw .

At this overwhelming gesture, Inke had to give in. Her surrender meant the tiresome chore of shopping for proper funeral clothes for her­self, George, and the children. For George wanted no expense spared.

Inke soon found, from the unctuous behavior of the tailors, that this was no ordinary funeral. It was to be a famous funeral. A world-changing funeral, a glamorous climacteric. In particular, everyone asked if George’s children were going to meet “Little Mary Montalban.”

There seemed no use in Inke’s obscuring the fact that her children were the cousins of Little Mary Montalban. Lukas, Lena, and even baby Ivan would personally meet the simpering, capering Little Mary Mon­talban, the “girl with the world at her feet”…

Mljet proved a keen disappointment. The island looked so mystical and lovely from the deck of a ferry, yet the landscape was a fetid, reek­ing wilderness, swarming with insects even in November, a rank place like an overgrown parking lot, and with scarcely any civilized amenities.

Inke’s little German guidebook made a great deal of pious green fuss about the returning fish and the swarming bugs and the glorious birds of prey and so forth, but—just like the “Treasure Island” of her older son’s favorite book author, Robert Louis Stevenson—Mljet must have been an excellent place to be marooned and go totally mad.

Inke remarked on this to the older boy but, although Lukas was not yet eight, and huge-headed, with missing teeth and spindly schoolboy limbs, Lukas already had his father’s wild look in his eyes. “Marooned and going mad!” Lukas thought that was wonderful. He would maroon his little sister Lena and make her go mad, by stealing all her dolls and leaving her without any playmates.

Construction work was booming at the island’s new tourist port, which was named Palatium. Someone highly competent was sinking a great deal of investment money here. Given that George was so deeply involved in those logistics, this was a heartening sight to Inke. It almost made up for the fact that the sea trip had badly upset the baby.

Palatium’s newly consecrated Catholic church seemed to be the first building formally completed. It was certainly the first decent place of worship consecrated in Mljet since who knew when. The church had a proper crying room with a trained nursemaid in it, a quiet American girl. This girl was Dispensation—it was annoying how many of them dressed themselves to show their politics—but she loved babies.

Nerves jangled, Inke dipped at the holy water, led the older children up the aisle, genuflected, and slipped into a front pew. Peace at last. Peace, and safety. Thank God. Thank God for the mercies of God.

The coffin was candlelit with its feet toward the holy-of-holies. Inke and the children shared the shining new pew with an old man sitting alone. Some threadbare Balkan scholar, by the look of him.

The poor old man seemed genuinely shaken and grieved by the death of Yelisaveta Mihajlovic.

Inke could not believe that Yelisaveta Mihajlovic had been any kind of decent Catholic. If she had been, she would have trained her chil­dren in the catechism, instead of stuffing their cloned heads like cab­bage rolls with insane notions about how computers were going to take over the world. Yelisaveta Mihajlovic was nobody’s saint, that was for certain. That dead creature in the elaborate casket there was the widow of a violent warlord, a Balkan Lady Macbeth.

Still, there had to be some redeeming qualities to any woman lying dead in church. After all was said and done, Yelisaveta Mihajlovic had created George. Inke knew well that George wasn’t quite human, but she considered that a distinct advantage in a husband.

Just look at that weepy old man over there; his blue-veined hands were clenched before his face, he was clearly Dispensation yet sincerely praying as a Catholic. Life wasn’t about being perfectly consistent, was it? Mankind were miserable sinners. If they didn’t know they were sinners before their whole Earth caught fire, they certainly ought to know that by now.

Inke rose from the pew to attend to the casket in the mellow candle­light. This was the most expensive, elaborate coffin Inke had ever seen. She’d thought at first that it was a properly open coffin, but no. The cas­ket had a bubble top of thin, nonreflective glass. The dead woman’s cof­fin was hermetically sealed.

And that corpse inside her bubbled sphere of death… what brilliant undertaker had been set loose there? The more one stared at those gaunt, painted, cinematic features, the more she looked like some bril­liant toy.

There was just enough graceless authenticity left to the corpse to con­vince the viewer that the undertaker’s art concealed an actual dead woman. Or a dead creature anyway, for the war-criminal fugitive had been living for years up in orbit, where human bone and muscle wasted away from the lack of gravity, where the air was canned and the skin never felt healthy sunlight… How many “days” had this waxwork crea­ture seen, with her dead silent-actress eyes, those orbital sunrises, sun­sets, as she bounded off the walls of her tin home like a fairy shrimp…

She didn’t even have legs!

A shroud covered her lower body. Thin, cream-colored, silky fabric.

Enough to veil her abnormalities, but enough to show the ugly truth to those who—somehow—must have known what she was doing to her­self, to her body and soul, way up there.

She was sickeningly strange. Yet at least she was truly dead.

A reflective shadow appeared on the glass bubble. It was one of the clones. The clone took a stance at the far side of the coffin. She stared into the bubble, fixated, gloating.

She was dressed in elaborate, lacy white, with a long stiff bodice but a plunging decolletage, like some bulging-eyed bride, drunk at a Catholic wedding and burningly eager to haul the groom to a hotel.

Inke had only met one of the cloned sisters: Sonja, the strongest one. She knew instantly that this one was Biserka. She knew that in her bones.

“I’m Erika Montalban,” Biserka told her.

Inke did not entirely trust her own English. “How nice. How do you do?”

“And you’re Inke, and those are your kids!”

Lukas and Lena were sitting placidly in their pew, heads together over a silent handheld game. Inke knew instantly that Biserka would cheerfully skin and eat her two children. She would gulp them down the way a cold adder would eat two mice.

“Where’s the baby?” Biserka demanded, scanning the church as if it sold babies on racks. “I love babies! I want to have lots of them.”

Inke touched her scarf. “You should wear something… on your head. We are in a church.”

“What, I have to wear a hood in here, like a Muslim girl or something?”

“No, like a Catholic.”

“Do I get to eat those little round bread things?”

“No, you’re not in a state of grace.”

“I put the holy water all over myself!”

“You’re not a Catholic.”

“It is always like that!” Biserka screeched, wringing her hands in an­guish. “What is with you people? I did everything right, and you’re not having any of it? I’m going to find John. John is going to fix this, you wait and see!”

Biserka stormed out of the church.

“You told her the proper things,” said the old gentleman. He had stepped from his pew to the coffin, without Inke hearing his tread. He spoke English. “You were kind and polite to her.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“My name is Dr. Vladko Radic. You do not know me, Mrs. Zweig, but I know a little of you. I am a friend of Vera Mihajlovic.”

“I understand. How do you do?”

“I also knew Yelisaveta Mihajlovic. I knew her rather well; Yelisaveta was a great patriot. Of course she committed excesses. God will pardon her that. Those were very excessive times.” Radic was drunk. Drunk, and in church.

“If I may ask you a favor,” slurred Dr. Radic, “if an old man may ask you one small favor… the dead have to bury the dead, but my dearest domorodac, my dearest Mljecanka, Vera Mihajlovic… A very beauti­ful, very sincere, very lovable girl… for all the infernal machines that cover this island, it has never been the same without her!”

Radic began sobbing, in an unfeigned, gentlemanly fashion, wiping at his rheumy eyes. “I sit here praying for Vera… praying that she will come here to see this unfortunate woman, and that Vera can return to this place, and that life here can be made right again! Have you seen Vera?”

“No sir, I have not seen her.”

“Please tell Vera that all is forgiven if she will come back to the island! Please tell her that… yes, life will be different, life must be different now, but Dr. Radic has not forgotten her, and she has many friends here and she will always have friends.”

The poor old man’s distress was so deep and immediate and pitiful and contagious that Inke burst into tears. “I know that Vera is here. She must be here.”

“She is a very noble, good person.”

Overwhelmed, Inke fled to the pew to rejoin her children. Lukas glanced up. “Is that our grandmother dead in that bubble?”

“No.”

“Okay!” They returned to their game.

Worshippers were quietly filtering into the church. The liturgy began. It was a small church but an impressive, full-scale performance, which might have suited Zagreb or even Rome. Lectors, musicians, altar boys—the ceremonial staff almost outnumbered the attendees.

Then there were cameras. Not the small cameras everyone carried nowadays. Large, ostentatious, ceremonial cameras with sacred logos.

There was no sign of George at the funeral service, which was en­tirely typical of him. Yet the young priest—handsome, bearded, deftly in command of the proceedings—was an inspiration.

It seemed impossible that anyone could properly bury a creature like Yelisaveta Mihajlovic: yet she had to be buried somehow, all things had to pass, and this priest was just the man to do it. Each soothing element of the ritual was another wrapping round the creature’s airtight coffin: the Introductory Rite, the Liturgy of the Word, the Intercessory Prayer, the Office of the Dead from the Liturgy of the Hours…

This priest was nobody’s fool about the goings-on here either, for he chose to speak from Wisdom, Chapter Four:

Those who lacked a firm grounding in Scripture could not follow the priest’s allusions, but those who grasped his meaning, grasped it well. Inke took satisfaction in that. She was suddenly glad she had come to the funeral. She always had a terror of preparing for a funeral, but as a funeral itself went on, there was always something right and good about it. When a funeral was over she felt profoundly glad to be alive.

Six pallbearers solemnly carried the creature’s glassy casket to a hill­side above the reviving city of Palatium. There was a neat hole in the soil there, chopped there as if by lasers. They conveyed the capsule into the Earth.

There was an impressive crowd at the graveside, much larger than the gathering inside the church. George had finally made it his business to appear. He looked solid and dignified.

The glamorous mourners at graveside were not seeking any consola­tion in the rituals of faith—on the contrary, it was entirely clear to Inke that they were there on business. They were all stakeholders in this process, somehow. They were cunning people. They all had good rea­sons to be here. They were burying the past so as to get a firm foothold on some ladder into tomorrow.

She was surrounded by handsome, self-assured, polished, gorgeous foreigners.

By the sound of their American English, Inke realized that these peo­ple had to be the Montgomery-Montalban clan. This was the famous Family-Firm, with its blood relations, its staffers, servants, investors, and trustees. How strange to think that Europe was so full of conscientious social justice, while America had its ruthless aristocracy.

There was a sudden jostling as a whole shoving crowd of Acquis cadres plowed through the crowd. These Acquis were unruly and ill re­hearsed, for they had invited themselves to the proceedings. They had some right to investigate the proceedings, it seemed. Unwelcome yet in­evitable, the Acquis were here like the police at a mafia wedding.

George was talking rapidly to one of the Acquis spies; for some reason, George was abandoning the decent suit she’d bought him and bor­rowing the man’s white jacket.

There was another trampling surge past the grave—how had the crowd grown so large and unruly, so suddenly? A host of bodyguards and paparazzI.

Little Mary Montalban had appeared upon the scene.

The child actress, whose skyrocketing fame had the world in such a tizzy—she seemed just another child to Inke, rather neatly and soberly dressed in gorgeous mourning clothes. The child walked serenely through the crowd, breaking a wake through them, as if she parted adult crowds every day.

The little girl drew nearer.

Suddenly, she turned her face up to Inke. The girl’s beauty was as­tounding. It burned and dazzled, like being hit in the face with a search­light.

The child recited two lines, loudly, in a well-rehearsed German. “How do you do, Tante Inke? I’m so glad to see you here with us.”

Inke found herself bending to kiss the child’s delicate cheek. It was an irrevocable act, something like swearing allegiance.

Her children were thunderstruck to meet their famous cousin. It was as if someone had given them a toy angel.

Inke realized that the male stranger at her side was John Mont­gomery Montalban. She had met him once. John Montalban looked older now. And shorter, too—somehow, world-famous people were al­ways much shorter in real life.

“George has asked me to say a few words after the interment,” Mon­taIban said. “My little Synchronist eulogy… I hope you won’t mind that, Inke.”

It was as if he were pouring warm oil over her head.

“Are you nervous?” she asked him, the first remark that fluttered onto her tongue.

“Yes, I’m worried,” Montalban lied briskly, “I always hate these for­mal presentations… Inke, you married George. So you’re our expert on the subject at hand here. What on Earth can I properly say about Yelisaveta? At the end of the day, it seems that I knew Yelisaveta best. Yet she was—of course—a monster. What can I say about her that isn’t completely shocking to propriety? The world is listening.”

Inke considered the world—the poor, imperiled world. “Did the old woman ever tell you that she would come back to the world, down from orbit?”

“She did. Sometimes. She was stringing us on, from her lack of any­thing else to do with herself. It was like a long hostage negotiation. Please give me some good advice here, Inke, help me out. Tell me what I should say about this situation. The world needs closure on the issue. She was our relative, you know.”

Why was he talking to her in this confiding way? In the past, he’d al­ways talked to her with the hearty exaggeration of an English lordship treating one of the little people as his equal.

“I think,” she said haltingly, “I think Yelisaveta was just… a dark story made by her own dark times.”

“That makes some sense.”

“She tried to build something and it broke into pieces. The pieces could not hold. So she lied, cheated, and killed for nothing… but the truth is… she believed in every last horrible thing that she did. She fully believed in all of it. She was sincere, that was her secret. It was all her sacrifice and her grand passion.”

Montalban was truly interested. “That is fabulous. How well put! And George is one of the remaining pieces, too! Yet George is the piece that is least like the rest of the broken pieces. He’s not much like them, they really hate him for that… Why is that, can you tell me that?”

“George is a man. Men take longer to mature.”

“I see. That may indeed be the case… in which case, may I tell you something important now about your George? George has always led a dodgy, improvised life… between the Dispensation and our good friends the Acquis… he was cutting corners, making connections… After this funeral George will have a changed life. Because those two great parties are finding a bipartisan consensus. We have found the pow­ers necessary to defeat the climate crisis… And in doing that, we have let so many genies out of bottles that our Earth is becoming unimagin­able. Do you see what I mean here? Instead of being horribly unthink­able, the Earth is becoming radically unimaginable.”

Montalban was so solemn and passionate in this assessment that all Inke could do was blink.

“Inke, I aspire to see a normal world. A normalized world. I have never yet lived in any normal world, but I hope to see one built and standing up, before I die.”

“A ‘normal’ world, John?”

“Yes. ‘Normal.’ Like you, Inke. To be normal is a very conservative business. Your husband is going to become a conservative businessman. That is necessary, and I’m going to help him.”

“You’re not a conservative businessman?”

“No, Inke, alas, I’m a hip California swinger from Hollywood who has multiple wives. But I do need a conservative businessman, rather badly. And since your George is part-and-parcel of a Relinquished ex­periment, he is perfect for that role. I foresee a leadership role for George. He will become a modern captain of industry and a pillar of a new world consensus.”

“My husband admires you very much,” she told him, “and he would like to trust you, but really, John… Biserka. Why Biserka?”

“Yes,” he said wistfully, “I know. ‘Biserka.’”

“Why?”

Montalban looked at the gathered children—they were plunging through the crowd, bobbing like corks. “My little daughter Mary… she lacks for playmates. Mary doesn’t have much of a peer group. Why don’t you and the kids come and visit us this Christmas? We’ll all go to Lily­Pad. Up in orbit. It’s very quiet up there. It’s private. We’ll have a good long chat about certain matters. You and I, especially. We’ll iron some things out.”

“Why do you want to fly into outer space? That is dangerous.”

“The Earth is dangerous. And the sun is also disquieting. If the sun grows seriously turbulent—then Mars wouldn’t be far enough away for us. I commissioned some speculations on that topic. We’ve made some interesting findings. Should the Earth’s sun become unstable, it turns out that, with the Earth’s present level of industrial capacity, we could escape to the Oort Cloud with a biosphere ark of maybe a hundred, a hundred and fifty people. Carrying our ubiquitous support machines, of course.”

Montalban seemed to expect an answer to this extraordinary declara­tion. “Of course,” Inke told him.

“The Earth would become a cinder. Mars would be irradiated. Hot gas would be blasting off the surfaces of Jupiter and Saturn. The only spark of living vitality left in the solar system would be a shiny bubble containing us. Us, a whole lot of our maintenance machinery, and mostly, microbes.”

“‘Us’ John.”

“Yes, I mean us, Inke.” He waved his hand at the funereal crowd.

“You, me, the kids. People. There wouldn’t be much of us left, but we would be what there was.”

“You really think that way.”

“Yes, I have to think that way. It’s necessary.”

“You’re not a conservative businessman, Mr. Montalban.”

“No, I’m what people call a ‘Synchronic realist.’ We choose to look directly at the stark facts of science and history.” Montalban sighed. “Of course, whenever one does that in an honest spirit, everything becomes visionary, abnormal, and extreme.”

There was a bustle at the graveside. Somehow, amazingly, George had assembled his sisters into a public group.

Since they violently loathed one another, Vera, Sonja, Radmila, and Biserka had all been determined to stand out during the funeral. Rather than wear proper dark mourning clothes—as everyone else was doing—they had each, independently, decided to mark themselves out as free spirits by dressing entirely in white. So the sisters were all in white, iden­tical, grim and chilly and marbled, pale as statues.

Making the most of this misstep, George had hastily borrowed a white jacket from an Acquis cadre. He’d ripped off the jacket’s political tags, pips, and braiding. So George was also in white.

Gathered there at the monster’s graveside, two by two with George standing at their head, the women were intensely romantic and pretty. Five siblings holding up the autumn sky.

“This is George’s finest hour!” said Montalban, his dark eyes wide. “Look what he’s achieved! I could never do that! Never! He’s got them publicly holding hands! Like when they were kids!”

Inke knew fear. “This is not going to work.”

“Of course it will work! He’s finally got them burying their primal trauma here! Even though they’re a broken set, they’re violently off-kilter… they’re letting go of their past! Everybody’s watching! The whole world adores them.”

Inke knew that the women could not bear up. Flawed from birth, scorched by murder, their hearts were broken: they had failed compre­hensively. They were strong and resolute and intelligent women, but they could not possibly support the roles that fate had forced upon them. They were broken statues for a broken world.

“They cannot bear it,” she told him.

“Well, I’m not claiming that this is a perfect solution for them­—peace never lasts forever in the Balkans—but come on, Inke, they’re not stupid! Look, he’s giving them the ceremonial shovels!”

It was a local tradition to distribute short-handled shovels at a grave­side, for the convenience of mourners casting dirt.

George was the first to pitch in with his fancy shovel—without another word or gesture, he began heaving damp clods straight into the open grave. He looked thrilled, overjoyed. George meant to finally conceal a lifelong embarrassment. He might have filled that grave all by himself.

George was so gleeful and eager about his work that the women, as if helpless, fell into line.

Soon they were all throwing dirt into the Earth, earnestly, tirelessly. When each saw that the others were sparing no effort, they really set to. Their arms and legs in ominous unison, the clones labored like iden­tical machines.

Inke stared at the uncanny spectacle. Every spectator was silent and astonished.

Vera was the best at the labor. As an engineer, Vera understood dirt and digging. Vera had a pinched, virginal quality—Vera was a fanatic, the kind of woman who had never understood what it meant to be a woman. Vera was efficient and entirely humorless, a robot.

Radmila made it all look so effortless. She handled her shovel like a stage prop. Radmila was the world’s most elegant grave digger. It was as if every woman in the world should aspire to spend her evenings filling graves.

Sonja had filled many graves already. Sonja was the one who best un­derstood what she was doing. It was a moral burden to see Sonja at her deadly work. It made one sweat.

“Biserka isn’t doing much,” Inke said.

“We call her ‘Erika’ now,” said Montalban. “She broke her ribs. She’s still in a lot of pain.”

“Your Biserka is up to no good. Biserka has never been any good. She would never hold up her own part of anything.”

“I like to think of my Erika as a troubled girl from a severely disad­vantaged background,” said Montalban. “But, what the heck, yeah, of course you’re right, Inke: Biserka is evil.”

“Why her, John? The other one is the mother of your child.”

“Well, I love them all so very dearly, but… they’re so fierce and ded­icated and selfless and good! They frankly tire me! Biserka considers her­self a cauldron of criminal genius, but since she’s so completely self-absorbed, and so devoid of any interest and empathy for others­—motivated entirely by her resentment and always on the make—well, Bis­erka’s certainly the easiest to manage. There’s something abject about Biserka. I don’t have to negotiate that relationship all the time. Biserka is the one that I fully understand. And she needs me the most. Left alone in a room, Biserka would sting herself to death like a scorpion. She will always need her rescuer. She’ll always need a white knight to save her, she’ll always be in trouble, and she will always depend on me. That’s why I love her the best.”

“To love an evil woman means that you are evil.”

Montalban shrugged. “I like to think of myself as a deeply fallible man who is healthily in touch with his dark side.”

Biserka cast a shovelful of dirt over Radmila’s beautiful shoes. Rad­mila resolutely ignored her.

“Hey, I think I’m getting a blister!” Biserka whined, straightening and sucking at her fingers. “Why don’t we stop all this hard work and let the servants do it?”

“Get out of the way,” said Vera.

Biserka stabbed her shovel into a loose mound of dirt and departed the grave in a huff.

“You shouldn’t have said that to her,” said George mildly:

“Oh, so she has a hard life?” snarled Vera. “I’ve been digging up this island for ten years! Do you smell that fresh air from the hills? I built that fresh air.”

“You thought that was work?” Sonja demanded, incredulous. “Your ten-year vacation on a tropical island? I fought and I suffered! The air was black! The air killed people!”

Radmila was silky. “I hope you don’t expect us to praise you for worm­ing your way into the bowels of a totalitarian regime.”

“Listen to you,” shouted Vera. “You’re famous and rich! Even your daughter is famous and rich.”

“Vera, is it my fault that you missed out on life by dressing up like a skeleton?”

“At least I’m not like her,” shouted Vera, “a soldier’s whore who lifts her skirt for any man with a gun!”

Sonja scowled. “Like a Hollywood actress is the pillar of chastity? I don’t think our dirty skirts are any of your dirty business, Vera.”

“They’re going to kill each other now,” Inke told Montalban. “Those spades can be turned into weapons.”

“Any technology is a weapon. Go and stop them now, Inke.”

“What, me? I’m a nobody.”

“That’s what I treasure about you. You’re a normal human being, and you’ve even got normal kids. Go and stop them, Inke. You must. We’ve got only a few seconds left. Go intervene, make them more normal. Hurry.”

“You do it.”

“I can’t. Don’t argue with me. Do it, go.” Montalban squeezed her shoulder, gave her a little push.

Inke somehow tottered into the midst of the sisterhood. They’d stopped heaving dirt into the grave and were hefting their shovels to bat­ter and slash.

Everyone in the crowd was silently watching the tableau. Even George was staring at her intervention. Yet George seemed unsurprised to see her jumping into the quarrel. He was even daring to hope for the best.