Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death (6 page)

The director was a fat man who seemed to be dressing in imitation of Wolfman Jack. He came out onto the middle of the stage, looked Nick up and down and said, “Interesting.”

“Interesting?” Nick asked him.

“Sherry is an interesting woman,” the director said. “You agree with me?”

“Sure,” Nick didn’t think of Sherry as an interesting woman. Sherry was his agent.

“Read for me,” the director said.

The director’s name was Hammer Wade. It probably hadn’t been, in the beginning, but Nick wasn’t going to bring that up. He got his copy of the script out of the flight bag and climbed onto the stage. He found the page Hammer Wade wanted him to read from and plunged right in. Under ordinary circumstances, Nick was something of a method actor. He liked to think about his motivation and have somebody cue him when he felt ready to gear up. This time, since he really didn’t think there was any chance, he just read what was on the page with as much emotion as he could manage and got it over with.

When Nick was done, Hammer Wade sat in the first row of audience seats, drumming his fingers against his knees and looking thoughtful. Nick felt like an asshole, or a prize cow. He always did when he had to wait up on a stage while somebody stared at him. The wait went on long enough so that Nick started to get angry. He wanted to climb down into the audience and tell Hammer Wade to stuff his precious experimental script up his precious experimental ass.

“Okay,” Hammer Wade said finally.

“Okay, what?” Nick asked.

“Okay you’ll do,” Hammer Wade said. “We start work in three weeks. Maybe it’s four. Right after New Year’s—”

“It’s four,” Nick said, feeling a little dazed. “I’ll do?”

“—We pay like shit and we don’t start paying until rehearsals get into gear,” Hammer Wade was going on, “so you’re probably going to need a job if you’re going to stay around New Haven, and I want you to stay around New Haven because I want you to do some publicity. We’re going to get great publicity. You know how to dance?”

Nick knew how to dance. He’d taken lessons. He’d taken millions of lessons. “I didn’t think there was any dancing in this part,” he said stiffly.

“It’s not for the part,” Hammer Wade explained. “It’s for the job. If you need a job to tide you over for the next month. It’s for Fountain of Youth.”

Nick was feeling very dizzy. He was happy, yes, but he was definitely dizzy. He wanted to sit down and put his head between his legs.

“Is ‘Fountain of Youth’ a play?” he asked.

“Nah,” Hammer Wade said. “It’s one of those exercise studio places. Big deal, got branches out in California. Woman who owns the business is a friend of mine. They’ve got some deal going with a tour and special introductory classes and that kind of shit. It’s capitalist bourgeois as hell. They’re looking for an aerobics instructor.”

“Oh,” Nick said.

Hammer Wade was on his feet. He had produced a small notebook and a pencil out of thin air. Maybe he had been holding them both all along, and Nick hadn’t noticed them. He scribbled something down with elaborate slowness, tore the page off the top of the pad and handed it to Nick.

“Here,” he said. “That’s the address. I’ll call on ahead for you. If you need a job.”

In the SuperHour Grocery, frozen food was limited to brands Nick had never heard of in boxes that looked old. He passed into the aisle with the potato chips in it and looked over what was there. That was better. There were Lay’s and Wise and State Line. There were Doritos tortilla chips and Fritos corn chips and the first bag of Cheese Waffies Nick had seen in years. He had gotten the job at Fountain of Youth, of course. Like everything else in this perfect day, his interview there had gone perfectly. Now his pockets were stuffed with brochures and business cards and his airline bag back at Tom’s apartment was full of scheme drawings for aerobic dance choreographies. Bring your body to the Fountain of Youth, Nick thought, and nearly started to laugh.

He had a bag of pretzels in his hand and his mind on exercise clothes outlets—did he know where to find a Foot Locker in New Haven? Should he pick up some things when he went back to arrange his life in New York?—when he noticed the man in the aisle behind him, standing a foot away with his hands in his pockets and not doing anything at all. At first, Nick thought it was a jump. Some kid had seen him wandering around among the cholesterol killers, checked out the J. Press jacket, and decided he’d found an easy mark. Then Nick realized that the man was, in fact, a man, not a kid, and that he looked a lot like the man who had been at the checkout counter when Nick came in. Brothers, Nick thought absently. Nick looked back over his shoulder and saw the other one, still standing at the checkout counter. He was older than this one, and shorter.

Nick put the bag of pretzels back on the shelf, very carefully. “Do you want something?” he asked the man standing behind him, very pleasantly, very calmly.

The man looked away, toward the ceiling, toward the floor, gone. “You going to buy something?” he asked finally.

“I’m thinking about it,” Nick said.

“You don’t find what you’re looking for, I can help you.”

“I don’t need any help.”

“I help you, you’ll find what you’re looking for faster than you do it on your own.”

“I don’t need any help,” Nick said again. “If I find something I want to eat, I’ll bring it up to the counter.”

“You could be hours, looking for something you want to eat,” the man said. “You could leave without paying for anything. That wouldn’t be a good idea.”

In the big stores, they were subtler than this, Nick thought. The store detectives followed you at a distance. The saleswomen hovered inches away from your elbow, but they were smart enough never to actually accuse. They had been trained in the ins and outs of lawsuits. Nick was hungry to the point where his stomach hurt. He hadn’t had a chance to eat anything substantial all day. He wasn’t hungry enough for this. He looked at the bags of Lay’s potato chips and sighed.

“Forget it,” he said. “I think I’ll just get out of here.”

“No,” the man at the counter said. “No, Jerry, don’t let him out of here until you see what’s under his coat.”

The one called Jerry looked to the counter and then back to Nick. “Yeah,” he said finally. “Maybe that’s not a bad idea. Maybe I want to see what’s under your coat.”

“Of course,” Nick said, still calm, still pleasant. “And if there doesn’t happen to be anything under my coat, anything that belongs to you, that is, I think I’ll just go see my lawyer.”

“Don’t listen to him,” the man at the counter said. “Those people don’t have lawyers. They only got drug lawyers.”

“I want to see what’s under your coat,” Jerry said.

“No.”

Move. Countermove. Impasse. Nobody knew what to do next. Nick put his hands in the pocket of his jacket—it really was only a jacket; where did these two jerks think he was supposed to be hiding a lot of bulky packages of snack food?—and started to walk toward the front door. When he got to the counter, he nodded to the man who was standing there, he didn’t know why. The man reached under the cash register and came out with a gun.

It happened that fast. Move. Countermove. Impasse. Gun. The man behind the counter was hysterical and shaking. Nick Bannerman was scared to death.

“Jesus Christ,” Nick said.

“I want to see what’s under your coat,” the man behind the counter said. “Make him take his coat off, Jerry. I want to see what’s under his coat.”

“Calm down,” Nick said. “I’m taking off my coat.”

Nick unzipped his jacket and opened the flaps, so that the man could see. Then he took the jacket all the way off and laid it down on the counter.

“There,” he said. “There’s nothing to see.”

Jerry picked up the jacket and searched through it, feeling the pockets, feeling the lining. Then he put the coat down and turned away.

“There’s nothing in it,” he told the man behind the counter.

The man behind the counter got a mulish, angry look on his face. Nick thought he might be borderline mentally retarded. He was definitely dangerous.

“There has to be something in it,” he insisted. “He’s been in here for five minutes. He has to have taken something.”

“No,” Jerry said. “No, he didn’t.”

“Search his pants,” the man behind the counter said.

Nick picked up his jacket and put it back on again. “These pants are tight as hell,” he said. “I couldn’t hide a piece of Saran Wrap in them.”

“Search his pants,” the man behind the counter repeated.

Jerry reached across and grabbed the gun by the butt. He pushed at his brother’s hand until the gun was pointing at the ceiling. “Get out of here,” he told Nick. “We don’t want no niggers in here.”

“The neighborhood is full of them,” the man behind the counter said. “They’re taking over. There isn’t going to be anybody else left.”

Fighting this would only mean getting shot by the man behind the counter. The man behind the counter wanted to shoot something. He wanted to do it right away. Nick didn’t think he’d ever heard anybody call him that name before, never in his life. He’d heard about black people being called that name. He’d just never heard anybody actually use it.

Nick walked out of the store. He was still hungry as hell. He was still tired. There wasn’t enough light out here and he was afraid of the dark.

“Nigger nigger jungle bunny,” the man behind the counter screamed out after him.

The words went bounding around the brick and concrete and old dry-wood, getting bigger and bigger, louder and louder, until no other sound seemed to be possible in the universe.

Nick Bannerman was standing alone on a street corner at the end of his perfect day, feeling like he wanted to get his hands around the neck of the next white person he saw, and squeeze and squeeze and squeeze until he heard the neck bones snap.

C
HRISTIE MULLIGAN HAD BEGUN
to develop a phobia for her telephone. It had started one week ago today, and now—at nine thirty on the night of Monday, December 6—it had grown into legendary wackiness, so that she couldn’t even pick up the receiver when she knew that the voice on the other end was going to be somebody she wanted to hear. Nine thirty on Monday nights was when Christie’s boyfriend called her from his dorm at the University of Chicago. That was the time they had both decided would be optimal, since it was a time when neither one of them expected ever to have anything else they wanted to do. Monday nights were dead boring in New Haven. Everybody had gotten over their weekend hangovers and gone back to work. Out in the common room, Christie Mulligan’s suitemates were quizzing each other for an anthropology test that was supposed to take place at the end of the week. Christie was taking the same anthropology course. She ought to be out there with them, instead of lying here on her bed listening to the phone ring and ring and ring but not answering it.

“Christie?” Tara’s voice, coming through the door, muffled. “Christie, are you all right? Your phone’s ringing.”

“I’m fine,” Christie said. “I don’t want to answer it.”

Consultation out in the common room. More muffled words, so muffled they were indecipherable. “Okay,” Tara said finally. “As long as we know you’re all right.”

“I’m fine,” Christie said again.

Her hand went to her chest, under her sweater, under her turtleneck, under the skimpy little bra she wore because she was so small-breasted she didn’t really need a bra at all. The lump was still there, in her left breast, just where it had been two weeks ago when she had gone in to see the doctor. It was less like a lump than a marble, planted just underneath the skin. It was a hard round ball that seemed to move when Christie touched it, but never went away.

“This does not have to be the end of the world,” Dr. Hornig had said, one week ago, when the biopsy results came back. “Breast cancer is a curable condition as long as you catch it early enough to do something about it right away.”

“Did we catch it early enough?” Christie asked.

“Yes,” Dr. Hornig said. “We’re going to have to put you on radiation after the operation, but yes. But Christie, we have to do something about this
right away
.”

Breast cancer.

I can’t have breast cancer, Christie thought now. I’m too young to have it. Breast cancer happens to women who have been through menopause.

The phone was sitting on a big black steamer trunk Christie had brought to Yale from her room at home in Bellmare, Ohio. The steamer trunk had belonged to Christie’s mother when she was a student at Vassar in the early 1970s. Christie’s mother had died of breast cancer at the age of twenty-seven, when Christie was five.

The phone stopped ringing. Christie thought of David out there in Chicago, feeling half annoyed and half anxious because Christie had broken their covenant. That was what David always called what was going on between them. A covenant. David’s family were very religious Jews, and David like to give a biblical perspective to everything he could.

Now that the phone was quiet, it was too quiet. Christie sat up and wondered if she should call David back. Then she wondered what she would talk to him about. It had been bad enough last week, when she had just found out and didn’t really believe it yet. It had been bad enough before she started to hide from the doctor.

The doctor is only lying to me anyway, Christie told herself The doctor made a mistake. The doctor only wants to make a lot of money out of cutting me up. This thing is not really happening to me, and I won’t let them panic me into believing it is.

Christie got off the bed and walked over to the phone. She tried to touch it and couldn’t. She walked over to the window and looked out at the quad. This was Jonathan Edwards College at Yale University, the place she had dreamed of being since she was old enough to know what a university was. She was a sophomore who was majoring in sociology. When she graduated, she was going to go to work for a congresswoman and learn how to get into politics.

Christie went back across the room to the door that led to the common room and opened it up. Tara and Michelle were sprawled on the floor out there, two happy, slightly chubby nineteen-year-olds with a bucket of buttered popcorn sitting between them. Christie used to be slightly chubby, too, but over the last few months she had gotten bone thin.