Angel Falling Softly (23 page)

“A small annoyance. Garrick has a retired Treasury Department engraver on retainer. He prepares all our identification papers. Garrick convinced him that working for the family was a less risky and more rewarding hobby than passing the odd hand-drawn C-note at the 7-Eleven.”

“Should you be telling me things like that?” Rachel asked lightly.

“Who would believe you?”

“I suppose you’re right.” Rachel shook her head. There was no
suppose
about it. She began again, “The story you told about being named for the abbess—was that really you?”

“I was named for the abbess, as I said. Boleslaw and his kin lived in the tenth century. I was born in the sixteenth.” She paused, reaching back into the past. “In 1566, the year Transylvania fell under the suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire. When I was ten, my parents died. Kammy believes it was cholera. We were sent across the river to an orphanage in Szeged.”

“Oh,” said Rachel, remembering. “You said Michael was your stepfather.”

“Yes. As I remember it now, the orphanage was not a bad life. But ten-year-olds are such indomitable creatures.” This time she did smile. Her cheeks came close to dimpling, a smile that vanished as soon as she resumed her narrative.

“Two years later, a man arrived to claim the meager remains of our parents’ estate, ourselves included. He was from the provinces, he said. A distant relative. He had only recently heard of our parents’ deaths. He produced papers to the effect and a sufficient amount of money to convince the powers that be. He called himself Rakosi, a count of some sort or another. I was certainly impressed.”

Rachel glanced at her. The casual tone of her narration did not mask the tone of ambivalence in the statement
I was certainly impressed.

“But you said that Michael—”

“That came later.” Her brow furrowed. “Except for the Mother Superior, the sisters were quite happy for us, so rare it was for a child, let alone three, to be rescued from rags to riches. It only happens in fairy tales.” She conceded, “It was an adventure to experience so exciting and vast a world. So beyond our small imaginations. He took us to Budapest, Vienna, Paris. I had seen most of Europe by the time I turned fourteen.”

“You speak with a British accent.”

“I’ve spent most of my life in London. We came to America shortly before the Great War. Michael takes the long view of things, and he’s usually right.”

What are you leaving out?
Rachel thought as she pulled up to the curb on Larkspur Lane.

Milada opened the car door. Rachel reached across the armrest and grasped her arm. She said, and she did not speak out of any reflexive social obligation, “Thank you.”

Milada again showed that small, self-deprecating smile, in which Rachel had begun to see the whisperings of a long-buried childlike sweetness. “You have your angels to answer to, Rachel. I have my demons.” She got out of the car. “And I do hope yours have the ear of a kinder God than mine do.”

Rachel watched her walk up to the porch and disappear into the house. She drove home and sat there in the dark garage for a long time before getting out of the car and going into the house.

She told her husband as they got into bed later that night, “Milada came to the hospital to see Jennifer.”

“Milada? Really?”

“While we were driving home, she told me something of her childhood. I’d assumed she was born into money. But her parents died when she was ten. It was a number of years before she and her sisters were adopted by that well-off family.”

“Still, happily ever after, no? And you think it only happens in fairy tales.”

“Maybe it does.” She rolled over on her back and laid her head on the pillow and spoke to the ceiling. “
Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.
”

He sat down on the bed beside her. “I get worried whenever you start quoting Job.”

“Don’t be. Things are getting better after this. I just know it.”

“You’ve never been this sure before.”

She raised herself up on her elbows. “Because I have reason to believe,” she said and then kissed him.

It did not occur to him to ask why. As much as his wife might rail against God, she was the optimist in the family, the one who steadfastly refused to accept the bitter consignments of fate.

M
ilada sat next to the bed, where Rachel normally sat. She retrieved the WMI proffer from her attaché. It was a rough draft, full of estimates, talking points, trial balloons. Another month to finish the preliminary audit and put together a proposal. Another month after that to negotiate stockholder compensation and golden parachutes. By the end of the year, she hoped.

A nurse poked her head into the room. Her name tag identified her as “Suanne Lane, R.N.” She said, “Ma’am?”

Milada looked at her, threatened a glare, and then cocked her head to one side, innocently, quizzically. “Is there a problem?”

The nurse returned her look with equal severity.

Well, then?

The nurse nodded and backed out of the room and continued down the hall. Milada watched her through the glass. She might have to speak to that nurse alone. She returned her attention to the proffer. She took out a pen and circled a number she didn’t agree with, another she knew was wrong. Her pen hesitated on the paper, numbers and tables blurring together.

She rubbed her eyes, blinked hard, but her mind kept running away from the subject at hand. Or rather, it kept running to the girl beside her.

Milada had vaguely begun to understand the darker reasons for her attraction to the child and her irrational willingness to respond to Rachel’s pleas. She knew what it meant to be the last, best hope. She’d hunted for her sisters as the lioness hunts for her cubs. They could not have survived without her
.
And how she’d enjoyed tracking the prey, seducing them, cutting them away from the herd. Making them follow her, obey her—making them
like
her before delivering them to their fate.

“Sometimes I think I’m turning into him,” she’d told Kammy once. Kammy didn’t speak to her for months afterward. But Milada relished being the one who provided for them, the one
Rakosi
depended on. She would allow
nothing
to stand in her way.

She’d been in charge then and was now. Michael played the godfather role well, to be sure. He made and enforced the rules. He condoned or endorsed her decisions. And brooded in his Central Park West manse and carried on like a young Howard Hughes cast in
The Picture of Dorian Gray,
everything growing old around him while he remained the same.

DEI’s success was her success. It was enough, she told herself.
It was enough.
She hadn’t deliberately injured another human being in three hundred years. Not since Rakosi died. Not in a blood lust and not in anger.

And before Rakosi died? Yes, she had known what would happen to Rakosi’s victims. She understood why he did what he did and what he wanted: eternal companions to share the same lonely, eternal dusk. And so she had inured herself to a world in which a nasty, short, brutal life was the lot of common humans.

Even now, as removed from the temptation as she had become, as far removed from the instinct and inclination that had occasioned the sin, she still could not forget that she had once been tempted, that once she fell. There were stains on her soul that did not fade.

She could not change the past. But this child’s future she could change.

When Milada got back to Sandy, Kammy was sitting on the porch reading a journal by the glow of the porch light. Her Camry was parked next to the mailbox. Kammy could afford any car in the lot, and she always chose a Camry.

Milada parked the Mercedes in the garage and ducked out before the door closed. She checked her watch. Ten-thirty.

Kammy said, as she came up the walk, “You said to stop by sometime.”

Milada realized with a small start of apprehension that Kammy was wearing her scrubs. They could have passed each other in front of the hospital and not even known it. She reminded herself again:
Kammy doesn’t work pediatrics.

“I hope you haven’t been waiting long. You should have called first.”

Her sister shrugged the way she always did. “Your cell phone wasn’t on. I left a message.”

Milada got out her phone and turned it on.

Kammy gave her a funny look. “Milly turning her phone off? The thin mountain air must be getting to you. Garrick will never believe me. Anyway, I was at Wylde, and it’s not that much farther to here.”

Milada breathed a quiet sigh of relief. She unlocked the front door. Kammy followed on her heels.

“You’re certainly not cramped for space,” she observed. “Your kitchen is bigger than my flat in New York.”

“My limo’s bigger than your flat,” Milada said, getting the bottle of Sparkling Catawba from the fridge.

“What’s that?”

“A ginger ale and grape juice concoction.”

“I’m game.”

Milada filled two glasses. Kammy sat down at the counter and took a sip. “Doesn’t suck. Rather bland, though. A wine spritzer sans the alcohol.”

“Sort of a metaphor for this place.”

“The mountains are nice. In the mornings I don’t have to mess with my Indiana Jones outfit.”

“At least you don’t mind wearing your Indiana Jones outfit.”

“When it’s a hundred degrees outside? Yeah, I do.” She drank a little more of the Catawba. “How’s the Wylde deal going?”

“A few critical variables are still up in the air. It’ll all shake out soon enough.”

Kammy nodded. “I’m for it.”

Milada made no effort to hide the surprised look on her face.

“Hey, I’m not agreeing to any of this running-the-company business. I’m only saying that there are a whole bunch of cool things we could do with the resources they’ve got there. I wonder if St. Jude is tied into their databases.” She got out her cell phone. “Sending myself a memo,” she explained, thumbing the keyboard pad.

Milada said casually, “I’ve been thinking that Wylde presents a good opportunity to analyze the properties of the virus.”

“The virus?” Kammy snapped the cell phone shut and looked up. “Oh,
that
virus.”

“You have to have the mutation to survive, right? What if a way could be found to mitigate that condition?”

“Hypothetically the mutation could be engineered with a retroviral vector,” Kammy said. “Nobody’s got it to reliably work yet, but let’s pretend. So a significant fraction of the population gets to live forever, farming the rest of the human race for their hemoglobin. Wow, talk about your haves and have-nots.”

“I don’t mean that.”

“Even if the CCR5 barrier could be engineered around, then what? We’re sterile, remember? Humanity would die out. Pretty much the definition of a Pyrrhic victory, no? I mean, there’s a reason for the rules.”

“The rules Michael made up, you mean,” Milada said.

“Be serious. That’s like saying gravity’s just a rule Newton made up. Try stepping off a tall building and see if you don’t go splat. We can’t go around infecting people willy-nilly. I for one have no desire to end up on a slab at the CDC being puzzled over by a bunch of epidemiologists. The only way to keep a secret is to keep the secret.”

“No one said anything about willy-nilly.”

“There’s always a price,” Kammy said. “You know that. We paid it. Do you want to pay it again? Do you really want to make somebody else go through
that
again?”

“Conditions can be mitigated.”

“What, like an existential epidural?”

“You’re the doctor. Explain why any woman would have a child more than once.”

“Hormones. Sex. Endorphins. Family. Love. Progeny.” Kamilla’s eyes narrowed. “What are you getting at?”

“I’m not getting at anything.” Milada said, a bit too defensively. “What about killed virus? Blood to blood, not enough to infect but enough to generate the necessary antibodies and attenuate the immune response? I recall you mentioning that the infection threshold is fairly high.”

“In a normal, healthy human.” Kammy nodded. “What immune response?”

“Say, organ transplantation.”

An amused look flashed across her sister’s face. “You’ve been doing your homework, Milly.” She thought about it for a minute. “You’ve got a point. That’s the one thing that really cripples quality of life even in successful transplant patients.”

“What about the venom? Its immunological qualities. Remember that girl Zoë slept with?”

“Yeah. Good thing her parents weren’t keen to nose about the exact nature of the relationship.” But she shook her head. “It’s pretty weak tea. Even concentrated. A mild allergic response, yes. It’s not going to touch a real autoimmune disease like lupus.”

“Graft versus host?”

“GVHD? Not a chance.”

So it was back to the virus. “What about the genome? The genes that keep us living?”

Kammy laughed. “My God, Milly. You really are keen to monetize this investment of yours.”

Milada answered with a nonchalant shrug. “It’s what I do.”

“You know,” Kammy said slowly, “you might have something there.” She rested her elbows on the counter and tilted her head to the side. “Yes, that just might work. Sneak random samples into the database tagged as anonymous donors.”