The Astral Mirror (16 page)

“Yeah?” The old man broke into a barking, sandpaper laugh.

“Sure. And just to make sure, we’ll keep you frozen long enough so that the statute of limitations runs out on all the charges against you. You’ll come out of that freezer free and clear!”

Marchetti’s laughter grew louder, heartier. But then it abruptly stopped. “Hey, wait. Didn’t you tell me that nobody knows how to defrost a corpse? If they try to thaw me out it’ll kill me all over again!”

“That’s all changed in the past six months,” del Vecchio said. “Some bright kid down at Johns Hopkins thawed out some mice and rabbits. Then a couple weeks ago a team at Pepperdine brought back three people, two men and a woman. I hear they’re going to thaw Walt Disney and bring him back pretty soon.”

“What about Don Carmine?” asked Marchetti.

The lawyer shrugged. “That’s up to you.”

Without an instant’s hesitation, Marchetti ran a stubby forefinger across his throat.

Del Vecchio had every intention of honoring his commitment to Marchetti. He really did. The fireplug-shaped old terror had truly been like a father to the younger man, paying his way through college and even law school after del Vecchio’s father had been cut down in the line of duty one rainy night on the street outside a warehouse full of Japanese stereos and television sets.

But one thing led to another as the years rolled along. Del Vecchio finally married and started to raise a family. More and more of the Mob business came under his hands, and he made it prosper better than ever before. The organization now owned banks, resort hotels and other legitimate businesses. As well as state legislators, judges, and half-a-dozen Congressmen. Violent crime was left to the disorganized fools. Del Vecchio’s regime was marked by peace, order, and upwardly-spiraling profits.

One after another, Marchetti’s lieutenants came to depend on him. Del Vecchio never demanded anything as archaic and embarrassing as an oath of fealty, kissing the hand, or other ancient prostrations. But the lieutenants, some of them heavily-built narrow-eyed thugs, others more lean and stylish and modern, all let it be known, one way or the other, that to revive Marchetti from his cryonic slumber would be a terrible mistake.

So Marchetti slept. And del Vecchio saw his empire grow more prosperous.

But owning legitimate banks and businesses does not make one necessarily honest. Del Vecchio’s banks often made highly irregular loans, and sometimes collected much higher interest than permitted by law. On rare occasions, the interest was collected only after brutal demonstrations of force. There were also some stock manipulations that finally attracted the attention of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and a string of disastrous fires in Mob-owned hotels that were on the verge of bankruptcy.

And even the lackadaisical state gambling commission roused itself when the federal income tax people started investigating the strange phenomenon of certain gambling casinos that took in customers by the millions, yet somehow failed to show a profit on their books.

Once he realized that there was no way out of the mounting legal troubles facing him, del Vecchio decided to take his own advice. Carefully, he began to create a medical history for himself that would end in clinical death and cryonic immersion. He explained what he was doing to his most trusted lieutenants, told them that he would personally take the blame and the legal punishment for them all, allowing them to elect a new leader and go on operating as before once he was declared dead. They expressed eternal gratitude.

But del Vecchio knew perfectly well how long eternal gratitude lasted. So he sent his wife and their teenaged children to live in Switzerland, where most of his personal fortune had been cached with the gnomes of Zurich. He gave his wife painfully detailed instructions on when and how to revive him.

“Fifteen years will do it,” he told her. “Can you wait for me that long?”

She smiled limpidly at him, threw her arms around his neck and kissed him passionately. But she said, “I’ll only be fifty-eight when you get out.”

Del Vecchio wondered if she knew about his playmates in Boston. He realized he would still be his current age, forty-seven, when he was thawed back to life. There would be plenty of other women to play with. But would his wife remain faithful enough to have him revived? To make doubly certain of his future, he flew to Zurich and had a very tight legal contract drawn by the bank which held his personal fortune. The gnomes would free him, if no one else would. Otherwise his money would be donated to charity and the bank would lose control of it.

“What you’re doing may be legal, Del, but it’s damned immoral.”

Del Vecchio was having dinner with one of the federal district attorneys who was prosecuting one of the innumerable current cases against him. They were old friends, had been classmates at law school. The fact that they were on opposite sides of the case did not bother either of them; they were too professional to allow such trivialities to get in the way of their social lives.

“Immoral?” Del Vecchio shot back. “What do I care about that? Morality’s for little guys, for people who’ve got no muscle, no backbone. You worry about morality, I’m worrying about spending the rest of my life in jail.” They were sitting at a small corner table in a quiet little restaurant in downtown Providence, barely a block from the federal courthouse, a place frequented almost exclusively by lawyers who never lifted an eyebrow at a defendant buying dinner for a prosecuting attorney. After all, prosecuting attorneys rarely made enough money to afford such an elegant restaurant; candlelight and leather-covered wine lists were not for the protectors of the public, not on the salaries the public allowed them.

“If the jury finds you guilty, the judge has to impose the penalty,” the district attorney said, very seriously.

“Jury,” del Vecchio almost spat. “Those twelve
chidrools!
I’m supposed to be tried by a jury of my peers, right? That means my equals, doesn’t it?”

The district attorney frowned slightly. “They are your equals, Del. What makes you think...”

“My equals?” del Vecchio laughed. “Do you really think those unemployed bums and screwy housewives are my equals? I mean, how smart can they be if they let themselves get stuck with jury duty?”

The attorney’s frown deepened. His name was Christopher Scarpato. He had gone into the profession of law because his father, a small shopkeeper continually in debt to bookmakers, had insisted that his son learn how to outwit the rest of the world. While Chris was working his way through law school, his father was beaten to death by a pair of overly-zealous collection agents. More of a plodder than a brilliant student, Chris was recruited by the Department of Justice, where careful, thorough groundwork is more important than flashy public relations and passionate rhetoric. Despite many opportunities, he had remained honest and dedicated. Del Vecchio found that charming, even noteworthy, and felt quite superior to his friend.

“And what makes you think they’ll find me guilty?” asked del Vecchio, just a trifle smugly. “They’re stupid, all right, but can they be
that
stupid?”

Scarpato finally realized he was being baited. He smiled one of his rare smiles, but it was a sad one. “They’ll find you guilty, Del. They’ve got no choice.”

Del Vecchio’s grin faded. He looked down at his plate of pasta, then placed his fork on the damask tablecloth alongside it. “I got no appetite. Haven’t been feeling so good.”

With a weary shake of his head, Chris replied, “You don’t have to put on the act for me, Del. I know what you’re going to do.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re going to get some tame doctor to pronounce you dead and then have yourself frozen. Just like Marchetti.”

Del Vecchio tried to look shocked, but instead he broke into a grin. “Is there anything illegal about dying? Or being frozen?”

“The doctor will be committing a homicide.”

“You’ll have to prove that.”

Scarpato said, “It’s an attempt to evade the law. That’s immoral, even if it’s not illegal—yet.”

“Let the priests worry about morality,” del Vecchio advised his old friend.

“You should worry about it,” said Scarpato. “You’ve turned into an asocial menace, Del. When we were in school, you were an okay kind of guy. But now...”

“What, I’m going to lose my soul?”

“Maybe you’ve already lost it. Maybe you ought to be thinking about how you can get it back.”

Del Vecchio grinned at him. “Listen, Chris: I don’t give a damn about souls. But I’m going to protect my body, you can bet. You won’t see me in jail, old buddy. I’m going to take a step out of time, and when I come back, you’ll be an old man and I’ll still be young.”

Scarpato said nothing, and del Vecchio knew that he had silenced his friend’s attempts at conscience.

Still, that little hint of “yet” that Scarpato had dropped bothered del Vecchio as the days swiftly raced by. He checked every aspect of his plan while his health appeared to deteriorate rapidly: the doctors played their part to perfection, his wife was already comfortably ensconced in Switzerland, the bankers in Zurish understood exactly what they had to do.

Yet as he lay on the clinic table with the gleaming stainless steel cylinder waiting beside him like a mechanical whale that was going to swallow him in darkness, del Vecchio could feel his pulse racing with fear. The last thing he saw was the green-gowned doctor, masked, approaching him with the hypodermic syringe. That, and frigid wisps of vapor wafting up from the tanks of liquid nitrogen. The needle felt sharp and cold. He remembered that parts of Dante’s hell were frozen in ice.

When they awoke him, there was a long period of confusion and disorientation. They told him later that it lasted only a day or so, but to del Vecchio it seemed like weeks, even months.

At first he thought something had gone wrong, and they had never put him under. But the doctors were all different, and the room he was in was not the clinic he had known. They kept him in bed most of the time, except when two husky young men came in to force him to get up and walk around the room. Four times around the little hospital room exhausted him. Then they flopped him back on the bed, gave him a mercilessly efficient massage, and left. A female nurse wheeled in his first meal and spoonfed him; he was too weak to lift his arms.

The second day (or week, or month) Scarpato came in to visit him.

“How do you feel, Del?”

Strangely, the attorney seemed barely to have aged at all. There was a hint of gray at his temples, perhaps a line or two in his face that had not been there before, but otherwise the years had treated him very kindly.

“Kind of weak,” del Vecchio answered truthfully.

Scarpato nodded. “That’s to be expected, from what the medics tell me. Your heart is good, circulation strong. Everything is okay, physically.”

A thought suddenly flashed into del Vecchio’s thawing mind. “What are you doing in Switzerland?”

The attorney’s face grew somber. “You’re not in Switzerland, Del. We had your vat flown back here. You’re in New York.”

“Wh... how...?”

“And you haven’t been under for fifteen years, either. It’s only three years.”

Del Vecchio tried to sit up in the bed, but he was too weak to make it. His head sank back onto the pillows. He could hear his pulse thudding in his ears.

“I tried to warn you,” Scarpato said, “that night at dinner in Providence. You thought you were outsmarting the law, outsmarting the people who make up the law, who
are
the law. But you can’t outwit the people for long, Del.”

Out of the corner of his eye, del Vecchio saw that the room’s only window was covered with a heavy wire mesh, like bars on a jail cell’s window. He choked back a shocked gasp.

Scarpato spoke quietly, without malice. “Your cute little cryonics trick forced the people to take a fresh look at things. There’ve been a few new laws passed since you had yourself frozen.”

“Such as?”

“Such as the state has the right to revive a frozen corpse if and when a grand jury feels he’s had himself frozen specifically to evade the law.”

Del Vecchio felt his heart sink in his chest.

“But once they got that one passed, they went one step further.”

“What?”

“Well, you know how the country’s been divided about the death penalty. Some people think it’s cruel and unusual punishment; others think it’s a necessary deterrent to crime, especially violent crime. Even the Supreme Court has been split on the issue.”

Del Vecchio couldn’t catch his breath. He realized what was coming.

“And there’s been the other problem,” Scarpato went on, “of overcrowding in the jails. Some judges—I’m sure you know who—even let criminals go free because they claim that putting them in overcrowded jails is cruel and unusual punishment.”

“Oh my God in heaven,” del Vecchio gasped.

“So—” Scarpato hesitated. Del Vecchio had never seen his old friend look so grim, so purposeful. “So they’ve passed laws in just about every state in the union to freeze criminals, just store them in vats of liquid nitrogen. Dewars, they call them. We’re emptying the jails, Del, and filling them up again with dewars. They’re starting to look like mortuaries, all those stainless steel caskets piled up, one on top of another.”

“But you can’t do that!”

“It’s done. The laws have been passed. The Supreme Court has ruled on it.”

“But that’s murder!”

“No. The convicts are clinically dead, but not legally. They can be revived. And since the psychologists and sociologists have been yelling for years that crime is a social maladjustment, and not really the fault of the criminal, we’ve found a way to make them happy.”

“I don’t see...”

Scarpato almost smiled. “Well, look. If you can have yourself frozen because you’ve just died of a heart ailment or a cancer that medical science can’t cure, in the hopes that science will find a cure in the future and thaw you out and make you well again... well, why not use the same approach to social and psychological illnesses?”

“Huh?”