The Proteus Cure (12 page)

At least so he hoped. Shen was not yet a citizen. He studied for the exam in his spare moments and would be ready soon. But not if linked to a crime. Especially murder. He would be imprisoned or, worse, deported with Jing and Fai along with him. Back to China … to face the fury of the Party.

As he blew warmth into his hands, he heard a car and saw two headlights approaching. A black Mercedes pulled up. Shen opened the door and slipped into the passenger seat.

Dr. Gilchrist, wrapped in a dark blue overcoat, offered his gloved hand.

“Shen. Good to see you.”

Shen shook his hand and nodded. “How may this one help you, sir?”

“We have another problem, similar to the last.”

Shen’s heart sank. A refusal rose to his lips—but he held back. If this was for
Ji
ù-zhù-zh
e
… for her dream.

He kept his voice even. “Most unfortunate.”

“Yes, it is.”

Shen tightened his fists as his fragment of hope faded.

“What does
Ji
ù-zhù-zh
e
wish?”

“My sister’s concerns involve two people. One is a former patient. My sister wishes to be more circumspect this time. She wants surveillance and nothing more.”

Shen released a breath. He wondered what it would be like to have a god to thank. The Cultural Revolution had condemned belief in any god. The Party was all the god a comrade needed. So now he thanked the stars.

Only surveillance. That he could do.

“Very well.”

“We need to keep track of her movements. My sister doesn’t care what stores she goes to, what friends she visits. Her only concern is if she should consult a doctor other than Doctor Takamura.”

“That will require extra man—”

“No.” Dr. Gilchrist waved his hand between them. “No one else can be involved. Only you.”

“But how can this one watch twenty-four hours a day?”

Shen needed a way out. He had done surveillance for the Party and found it a soul-deadening waste. And then he had an idea.

“If patient make doctor’s appointment she will do by phone. If we tap phone, we know. The other way we not know until she goes to doctor.”

Dr. Gilchrist rubbed his chin as he stared through the windshield. Shen was about to add to his suggestion when the doctor turned to him and smiled.

“Great idea, Shen. I knew you’d be a valuable asset.”

Shen basked in his approval, for he was speaking for his sister,
Ji
ù-zhù-zh
e
.

“I shall place tap tomorrow night.”

“Excellent.” He dug a slip of paper out of his coat pocket and handed it across. “Here’s the address.”

And now the hard question. “And if this woman decide to see other doctor? What do then?”

Dr. Gilchrist looked down. “Then she must be removed.”

May it not happen, Shen thought.

Then he said, “You say two people?”

“The other is Doctor Takamura.”

Shen choked, trying to hide his inner turmoil. Dr. Sheila … everyone liked her. Shen too. She had a smile for everyone, including him.

He remembered her husband, Hideki Takamura, an investigator for the JCAHO, who had discovered a connection between Tethys and VecGen and was about to reveal his findings. Dr. Gilchrist said that if they lost their accreditation, it would be the end of Tethys, the end of their ability to help people like Jing. An end even to
Ji
ù-zhù-zh
e
.

And so Shen had loosened the bolts on the front wheel of Takamura’s motorcycle, while it was parked at his office. When the man reached the right speed, he lost control and smashed into oncoming traffic. An unfortunate accident.

That had been in the days before fatherhood. Shen had been different then. And he had not given the man or his fate a second thought until Doctor Takamura joined Tethys’s staff. He recognized the name, and soon learned that he had killed her husband.

Even then he had not felt too bad. She was young and smart and pretty. She would find herself another man, perhaps one even better.

But as he’d grown to know Dr. Sheila, he saw the emptiness in her life, a void created by her husband’s death, and it saddened him.

But his sadness expanded, ballooned when he learned that he had created a double void in her life: She had been pregnant when her husband was killed, and had miscarried the next day. He had caused that miscarriage. He had killed Dr. Sheila’s baby.

What would her life be like now if she had not lost that child? Wouldn’t she find the same joy in him or her that Shen found in Fai?

“What wrong has she done?”

“Nothing yet, but she’s straying into dangerous territory. She’s got to be stopped.”

Shen closed his eyes and stifled a moan.

Stopped
…

Kill Dr. Sheila … just as he had killed her husband because he too had “strayed into dangerous territory.”

The brother had hired Dr. Sheila so he could keep an eye on her. In addition to routine monitoring, her work phone had been hooked to a voice-activated recorder, her office was watched on video, and Shen had installed spyware on her computer so the brother could see what files she accessed. Shen had monitored her for years but she kept her nose to her work. No suspicious calls, no sign that she knew about her husband’s discovery.

But now Dr. Gilchrist said she had to be stopped.

“Doctor Sheila?” Shen said, hoping for a different answer. “I must stop her?”

Dr. Gilchrist’s gaze faltered. He turned and stared through the windshield again.

“No one can be allowed to threaten my sister’s dream. No one.”

Paul sat down at his computer with a bottle of beer. He turned on the banker’s lamp and stared at the dark screen. Two nights ago he’d left the protagonist in his novel, Grisbe, on page 220, hanging in a precarious situation.

Paul had started novels before—lots of them—but always with invented characters plunked into fictional settings. That was how he thought writing fiction worked. He tried to copy his idols, John Irving, Charles Dickens, Wally Lamb. But his work always sounded forced, even to him. His characters seemed cardboard-flat, living in manufactured situations. Paul beat himself up with criticism. He’d finally decided he simply didn’t have what it took and threw away all the old partial manuscripts.

But a few months ago he started a new book. The hell with it, he’d decided. He was going to write a gritty, semi-true account of a part of his life he wished had never happened. No Beverly Hills setting with a Brad Pitt type as the lead. But reality, starring Paul Rosko. Or rather, Jim Grisbe. Ever since that decision to write from his heart, the novel had become an obsession. Each night when Coogan went to bed, Paul slipped into their den and poured out his heart, his memories. What a release.

After a day like today he needed a release. But too much was going on now to escape into fiction. Coogan was still in the hospital and Paul needed to find those old medical records. Tonight Grisbe would have to wait.

He descended to the basement and knelt on the dusty floor. Under a naked sixty-watt bulb he started sifting through a large plastic storage bin, kept tightly lidded to protect the papers from the damp.

Years ago he’d planned to finish the basement, but after the divorce it seemed a waste. Lots of things had seemed like a waste then. So the space had become a repository for whatever overflowed from upstairs. That included Paul’s free weights and punching bags, set up at the other end of the space. Paul found something cleansing in sweating and making his muscles ache.

Right now he felt an ache in his throat as he sifted through the boxes stacked in the container. The history of Coog’s life. A life that almost ended yesterday.

Some boxes held the good years—the baby records, the first drawings, the homemade Santa Clauses, Easter Bunnies, and Halloween ghosts. And the photos. Good God, he’d taken so many shots of that boy, all preserved in albums.

He opened one with
YEAR 4
Sharpie-printed on the cover and scanned the photos, shaking his head at shots of him together with little Coog. They’d looked so much alike back then. What had happened? When had Coog developed that cleft in his chin? Where had that come from?

He moved on to the bad years: two boxes of medical records, hospital bills, doctor reports … the detritus of a desperate battle.

And somewhere in that mess lay Rose’s histocompatibility results.

Took him an hour and a half, but he finally found Rose’s printout. And his too. As he hefted the two reports he remembered Sheila’s warning.

Even though the test won’t change Coog, a negative-paternity result will alter a crucially important part of his life.

Will I be different? Will I be hurting Coog?

He put down the reports and walked over to his workout area. He pulled on a pair of Everlast gloves, stepped up to the speed bag, and began working it.

He moved to the heavy bag and began punching away. No fine rhythm here, just brute force, pounding jabs, uppercuts, and roundhouse rights and lefts until his arms ached.

And by the time he’d finished and stood there bathed in sweat and gasping, he’d made up his mind.

He had to know.

The first thing Sheila had seen in the morning’s emails was a note from Hal Silberman, wanting to talk to her.

Yes!

She made a beeline for his office. “No need to tell me who this is about,” she said on entering. “Tanesha Green, right?”

“Right.” He pointed to the only other chair in his cramped office. “Have a seat.”

Hal didn’t match his office. He was trim, always perfectly groomed, and obsessively neat; Sheila had never seen him without a bow tie. His office, on the other hand, looked like a paper-recycling center.

Tanesha was scheduled for her follow-up soon and Sheila wanted to offer her
some
encouragement. But she didn’t see that happening.

The extensive labs—she’d put a
stat
on the orders—showed nothing. Sheila had done the usual profiles, plus more esoteric tests to tease out some rare variant of one of the connective tissue diseases or evidence of an autoimmune disorder. But every result fell within the normal range. The woman was—to borrow a phrase from her residency—disgustingly healthy.

Jim Haskins’s dermatology consultation yesterday was equally helpful—as in, not at all. He’d called to say how fascinating she was but his diagnosis was a figurative head scratch. He recommended a number of blood tests—all of which Sheila had already ordered—and deferred a diagnosis until he’d seen the path reports on the biopsies he’d performed.

That was where Hal Silberman, Tethys’s dermatopathologist, came in. Hal said, “I wish I could add to what’s in there, but …”

“What do the slides show?” Sheila said.

“She has some melanocytes that are producing the expected amount of melanin for a dark-pigmented person, but in among them are cells that are producing much less. So even though she appears to be suffering a general loss of pigment in the macroview, histologically it’s spotty.”

“Not a vitiligo variant, then?”

“No. Not mycosis fungoides, either. She’s got these normal-looking cells that have simply cut back their melanin production.”

“Ever seen anything like it?”

He shook his head. “Never. I searched through a number of sources and couldn’t find a thing that resembled her slides.”

“Any guesses as to etiology?”

“Off the top of my head I’d say that inhibition of tyrosinase activity is somehow involved, but don’t ask me how.”

Sheila knew that tyrosinase stimulated melanin production. Drop activity to zero and the result was an albino.

“So all the cells are producing melanin, just in different quantities.”

He nodded. “Right. Which implies that inhibition is originating locally, at the cellular level. Because a systemic process would cause more uniform changes.”

“Okay. But what about the hair changes? I knew Tanesha from her VG-seven-twenty-three therapy for colon cancer. She was an overweight, very dark-skinned African-American woman. The Tanesha I saw this week has changed into a hefty Jodi Foster. Light skin, straight light brown hair at the roots, but with the kinky black hair at the ends.”

“That’s another one for the books.” He rubbed his jaw. “Her follicles have changed shape and so, consequently, has her hair. The older portions of her strands are flattened, just as you’d expect in the woolly hair of a typical African. The portions nearest the scalp are oval in cross-section—typical of Caucasians. And the cortices of the newer segments contain less melanin.”

That explained
how
Tanesha’s hair was changing from kinky black to smooth brown. But not
why
.

“I’m going to send slides to all the big centers and I’m arranging a scanning EMG of her follicles. Maybe we’ll get a hit.”

“Any chance her chemotherapy could be responsible?”

“Hadn’t thought of it. Why, are there other cases?”

“Two weeks ago, a Caucasian women who had the same therapy with the opposite problem. She died accidentally before I could look into it.”

He smiled. “Never rule anything out. That’s my policy. I’ll research it with that slant, maybe check with the doctor who sent her back here. I’m sure his name is in the file somewhere.”

Finally someone responsive to her theory.

“So you think there’s a possibility the changes could be from the chemo? From VecGen’s therapy?”

“You never know. Certainly a possibility. Whatever happens, Sheila,” he said, “don’t lose track of this lady. I’d like to do another biopsy next week and compare slides.”

Sheila left. Silberman didn’t dismiss a link the way Bill did.
Certainly a possibility.
If Hal found a link, Bill would have to take him seriously. This guy had worked for Tethys since it opened its doors. Slides to all the major cancer centers. He guy didn’t fool around. Sheila felt better already. Between Hal and her, they’d find out the truth.