Rabid (35 page)

“Conroy?” Leila said. “Migraine. Put down the curtain.”

Danna’s trembling hand covered her eyes.

Conroy smoothed the curtain into place. “Have you been working with anything unusual in the lab?”

“I found a bottle of ricin in one of the freezers.”

Leila’s outraged jaw hung. “You have
ricin
? The chemical weapon from castor beans?”

Conroy mentally sorted through the freezers. “In the minus eighty? Third shelf?”

“Yeah.” Danna nodded and rubbed her neck with one floppy hand.

Conroy shrugged. “We used it for tissue culture back in the Stone Age, before organelle-specific fluoroprobes. It’s very dilute. You didn’t drink it, did you?”

Danna snuffled, laughing. “Not even a little.”

“Besides, ricin causes bleeding, hemorrhages, not viral symptoms. Anything else?” 

Danna said, “No. I was worried about touching the ricin bottle.”

“I’m sure that’s not a problem.” He waggled Danna’s limp foot, and Danna watched without much interest. “I’ll be back to check on you later. Leila? Can I talk to you in the hallway?”

“I’ll be right back, honey.” Leila followed Conroy into the searingly bright hallway. “Yeah?”

He tucked his pen into his pocket and whispered, “Has she called her parents?”

“No. She doesn’t want them to worry.” Leila glanced at the closed door beside them as if Danna could overhear that confidence betrayed.

“I’ll call them.” Conroy shook his head. Breaking bad news was one of his weak points, which was why he had gone into research. “This doesn’t look good.”

Her slim jaw worked, gritted, and she swallowed. “Come on. She was fine a week ago.”

“She went to the Paris conference with us two years ago, didn’t she?”

“Yeah.”

Conroy plucked his pen out of his pocket and clicked the blue ballpoint open and closed, twice. “They were having their first cases of BSE and nvCJD then.”

“She has mad cow disease?”

“Long, asymptomatic incubation. Rapid onset of symptoms. Encroaching paralysis. Photophobia. No hydrophobia. She’s not a vegetarian, is she?”

Leila shook her head. “She says that if God hadn’t wanted us to eat animals, He wouldn’t have made them out of meat.”

“She ate beef in France?” he asked.

“Worried about anemia without it. But nvCJD doesn’t have an immunological reaction. She has a fever and WBC elevation.”

“Atypical presentation.” Conroy sighed. He had hoped to hear that he had misremembered, that she hadn’t been to that conference, that she was a militant vegan. “Damn.”

~~~~~

At every moment in Bev’s creaking bed, Dante thought he should stop, but she had lain herself on him in the dark, and her skin was so smooth.

If God wanted him to abstain, why had He made Bev so beautiful and so soft? The Church’s misogyny and celibacy seemed to be an affront to God’s creation of women, His perfection of the human model, Man 2.0.

The dark room smelled oceanic, like a clean, sun-roasted Mediterranean beach.

~~~~~

Leila shut Conroy’s office door and locked it. The paper stacks on his desk trembled. 

Conroy was talking on the phone and waved her quiet. “Yes,” he said into the phone, “I’ll see you Sunday. I wish it were under better circumstances.” He hung up and picked up his notebook.

“Danna’s parents?” Leila asked.

Conroy nodded. “If it is nvCJD, Danna might have contracted it on that university trip, and once I ran that by the legal department, they had a conniption fit. The university is flying her parents in and putting them up at a hotel, just in case it is nvCJD, so they might not sue.” Conroy’s hand draped over the hung-up phone receiver. “I’m glad you convinced me that she needed looking at.”

Leila cleared her throat. “I came to pay up.”

Conroy’s forehead creased, confused, and then he waved off her approach. “Let’s talk about it next week.”

He flipped to a fresh page in his notebook and wrote
DANNA KERRY
in block letters.

Leila said, “This is all awfully nice of you. What’s next week?”

“The Dean committee is meeting on Monday. I can think about things, then.”

~~~~~

Bev rolled over. A flake of sunlight jumped from the curtained dormer window and touched Dante’s amber skin. She said, “I’m not asking anything specific about Luke, just how you knew about Nicolai if the kids didn’t tell.”

Dante slid onto his back, away from the window, and the sunlight shard glinted on silver strands embedded in his black hair. He dragged his fingers through his hair, tugging it away from his eyes. “We couldn’t trust what the children said, because either they might make false accusations or they might not make true ones. Once we eliminated their accusations, only heresy remained, and that the Church understands.”

Bev’s arm chilled, and she slipped it under her pillow. “I don’t know how you can just up and decide something is heresy.”

“There is an organization here in America that seeks to help pedophiles, to say that the rape of children is normal and good, to decriminalize it, even promote it. They have a website.”

“Everybody has a website these days.”

“We, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, declared the organization to be committing heresy. Priests who belonged to it or advocated for it or its ideas, even if they didn’t realize it, were guilty of heresy.” Dante sat up on one elbow. “A few months ago, the Congregation, like a department, the one that I work for, reabsorbed the IEA, the Institute for External Affairs, to which Father Domingo belongs.”

“Father Domingo, the guy who revamped the school’s curriculum.”

“Yes. They’re the Vatican’s version of the CIA, ‘God’s left hand,’ so to speak. They hacked the pedophile organization’s computers and its membership rolls. Everything on a computer leaves a trail. Of course, many men who were members were not priests, and many pedophile priests were not members, so we cross-referenced, studied contacts, acquaintances and correspondences and coincidences, chat rooms, address books, mailing lists, purchase orders. Father Nicolai was acquainted with unscrupulous men. We sent Father Domingo, and he found evidence.”

Bev decided not to mention her sacrilegious theory—the grace of the Holy Spirit working though Dante’s muscular yet limber body to show her the meaninglessness of sex—to the Monsignor who sent the Vatican’s CIA after heretics.

~~~~~

Conroy finished typing his letter to Beverly at eleven o’clock on Friday night and printed it. The printer spat it out with whirring gasps and one last, grating rattle. He called the university’s tech support to come and fix the printer Monday morning, during the time when the Dean committee met. He hoped to be busy then, called out of the office, and his printer would be fixed when he got back, too.

Excitement whirred in his cells. Sympathetic neurons fired and he was ready to fight for the neurology chair and his future and the Nobel Prize.

Later Monday, he could move a few things into his apartment and take Leila there, where no one would find them or squawk at them or harangue them or damn them or counsel them.

Monday, it would all come together for him
Monday
.

~~~~~

Saturday afternoon, slamming cold air filled the converted warehouse, the Wallball Hall, where Christine’s soccer game was being played. Conroy refereed the game as a lineman, whistling short bursts and flashing yellow cards, and Bev sat in the bleachers above, smiling, and served hot cocoa when the girls substituted off the field.

Jolinda and Pat, both choir members, didn’t know what to make of them. “They stopped going to counseling,” Jolinda said.

“They must be doing better.” Pat’s girl, Giorgi, the goalie, hovered near the edge of the goal but the halfback got the ball before the other team had a shot, and the game swung down the field. Pat hoped the Sloans were doing better, because Madge in the finance department had said that Conroy had booked a ticket back to Washington, D.C., next weekend, and she had just bet that Conroy was going to order room service for two again.

“Isn’t that Father Dante?” Jolinda pointed to a man wearing a black coat clanking up the metal stairs toward the spectators over on the other side of the field.

“And he’s sitting by Bev Sloan.”

Bev pointed to the field, her hand following Christine, and the priest nodded. Father Dante sat on the metal bench, leaned back, stretched out his long legs.

Pat grabbed her arm. “Did you see Conroy’s face?”

Jolinda looked. Conroy Sloan, down on the field, his face bulging with anger, ignored the other team pass the ball offside and score a goal past Giorgi.

The referee whistled the offside call and yelled at Conroy. The whistle echoed in the fuzzy-insulated, metal beams above.

A few weeks later, Jolinda and Pat shook their heads, dismayed. It was obvious, looking back, that wrath, and hate, and insanity, and murder were in the air.

~~~~~

Conroy stared at that goddamn priest who insolently sat next to Conroy’s smiling wife and watched his own eldest daughter charge down the field after the buckminsterfullerene ball.

Conroy’s younger daughter, her loyalties easily swayed, ran to the priest and hugged him.

Beverly and that priest inclined their heads toward each other, and collusion lingered in the shadows their heads cast on each other’s shoulders from the overhead fluorescent lights.

That priest had been at Conroy’s house lately, staying for supper, bringing wine. The priest had tracked down Leila.

Goddamn, meddling priest. The priest was a pair of black scissors slipping between Conroy and his family and his other women, slyly cutting Conroy out.

Beverly covered her mouth, laughing, and the priest glanced up at the cold, metal roof that reverberated with shouting and kicking and thumping.

He understood it, now. Beverly wanted a divorce and she had enlisted the eunuch priest to snoop so she would have evidence and so she could get an annulment, like a good Catholic. Those two were in it together. They had ganged up against him. They were colluding, string-jerking svengalis, cunning spymasters, betrayers and Inquisitors and executioners. And the priest was perverting Conroy’s daughters’ minds against him, probably preaching about what Conroy
should
be doing.

Beverly was cutting Conroy out of their life, replacing him with the Church as personified in
that sneaky, goddamn priest
. Beverly had a cultish streak. When he had first begun dating her, she had talked too much about the Virgin Mary, like they were roommates. He had worried that she was having hallucinations.

Now, he saw her method. She used the priest, she manipulated the children, and she was disposing of Conroy. They were all ganged up against him. He stood against them and their machinations alone.