All the Lives He Led-A Novel by Frederik Pohl Read Free Book Online

children. While Carrie was, and knew she was, a sickly somadone-hooked old maid. Sure, he had turned out to be a criminal, but we hadn’t known that at the time. How could we? He had all those diplomas and certificates of awards for being such a wonderful guy. Plus all those before-and-after virt pictures of raggedy and starving Tibetan kids who became well-scrubbed honor students with the help of his charities.
    So I told them everything I remembered, until they began looking bored. I won’t say that satisfied them. It did send them back to the corner to mutter at each other again, though. Leaving me standing there to wonder, a. how much deep shit I was in, and, b. what this meant to my never quite abandoned hope of finding Uncle Devious myself and squeezing my mother’s money out of him.
    When they came back they answered one part of that. “Let me show you something,” the man said. He touched parts of the keypad on his tunic. Across the room a screen lit up. What it was displaying was the face of a handsome man with a pencil mustache and just a few glints of gray in his neatly brushed hair. “Holy shit,” I said, “that’s Uncle Devious. DeVries, I mean.”
    The woman said, “Yes, this is how this Reverend Mr. Maddingsley looked when he went underground with his stolen funds.”
    “What he swindled out of my mother plus my aunt’s three-million-buck trust fund,” I agreed. And that $3 million was in real 2062 dollars, before the post-Yellowstone inflation.
    “Oh, more than that,” the woman said seriously.
    “Very much more than a minor embezzlement from members of his family,” Swinn agreed. “We don’t really know how much. But, yes, quite a lot. At any rate, that is how he looked when the search began”—more pat-a-pat on his blouse keypad—“and this is how he looked on April 25, 2059, when this other picture was taken. He had just recovered from his plastic surgery.”
    The new picture on the screen didn’t look anything like Uncle Devious anymore. For one thing, the smiling man it displayed was black, or coffee-cream color, anyway. He was also nearly bald. He wore neatly trimmed sideburns with a tiny sprout of white beardlet coming out of the dimple in his chin, which was nowhere near as manly as Uncle Devious’s.
    “That was taken at his estate near Ocho Rios in Jamaica,” the woman was going on. “Three days later the local police found him, but someone else had found him first. Then he looked like this.”
     
     
    I’ve seen plenty of sickening sights in my life but never one more sickening than that. The man was now naked and on a morgue pallet. He didn’t have any genitals. They had been hacked off. He didn’t have any eyes, either—gouged out, nothing left but bloody pits over where his nose, too, had been cut away. There’s no point saying how many other places on his body had been cut, stabbed, or gouged. I didn’t count. I didn’t vomit, either, but it was a close call.
    “It was definitely Delmore DeVries Maddingsley,” Swinn told me. “DNA match. Such matches are commonly made in America, where police have more freedom than we have with the do-gooders in Euro-center in Brussels—”
    The woman turned to look at him. She didn’t speak, but the male swallowed hard and abandoned the subject of do-gooders in Brussels. He said, “We think we know who did it to him—Brian Bossert, the guy who did the Boston Tunnel and San Francisco BART blowups. He’s dead, too. He got it in the Lake Ontario oil attack later that year. But we never found the money.”
    “What was left of it,” the woman said.
    “We did find the surgeon who rebuilt Maddingsley into that rather good-looking Negro,” Swinn said. “All the surgeon got for it, though, was a year in prison. Should’ve thrown the key away. There were some money judgments, too—he had to repay what Maddingsley had paid him, and of course we sold Maddingsley’s estate and all his stuff. We think Maddingsley had a lot