The Syndrome (48 page)

“Can I buy you lunch?” he asked. “We can talk about our future.”

They walked out into the cold and sunny day.

She had to ask: “Do you have any money? I’m getting low.”

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I do. The hospital gave me some walking-around money. Officially, I’m part of a research project. Had to sign a bunch of releases. I think Ray Shaw suggested I was going to sue.” The sidewalks were crowded, full of purposeful pedestrians. He took her arm as they approached the curb and held it as they crossed the intersection. “Especially,” he continued, “since I’m known to hang around with my own legal advocate.”

“Your unemployed advocate,” she corrected.

“We’re both unemployed,” he told her. “It’s something we share.”

She looked at him. He
was
different. This conversation was different from any she’d had with him. Maybe you couldn’t
joke around, she thought, maybe irony didn’t work—if you didn’t know who you were.

“So where are we going?”

“There’s a piña colada stand across the street from Needle Park. Seventy-second and Broadway.”

“Sounds perfect,” she said. “The hotel’s only a few blocks away.”

“They have hot dogs, too. The natural kind, with crunchy casings.”

“Grilled, not boiled!”

“Right! And real mustard—not that yellow stuff.”

“So, I take it, this means you know New York?”

He shrugged. “I know where to get a good hot dog.”

They walked on, looking for a cab. After a while, she said, “You’re right about one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t know about the hospital being spooked, but Shaw was. Spooked, I mean.”

“Yeah, I got that feeling, too. Probably just his department, leaning on him. He took a chance, doing what he did.”

“I know. If you’d gone out the window …” Her voice trailed away and she felt like an idiot, talking about suicide. Just a little while earlier, the man next to her had been tied to his bed in a pysch ward.

“That’s gone, by the way,” he said. “Along with the baseball bat and the blood. It’s so gone, it’s hard to believe I bought it. Bought it right down to knowing what it would feel like to …” He shook his head.

“But you did,” she said.

“What?”

“Buy it.”

They were at another intersection. He took her arm again, restrained her as a Step-Van hurtled through the red light. “Yeah I did,” he admitted. “And one thing’s for sure.”

They stepped off the curb. He didn’t release her arm. “What’s that?” she asked.

“I’m going to find out who sold it to me.”

She was looking for the name of the man in West Virginia, the name Shaw had written on a Post-it in McBride’s medical file, when the snapshot fell to the floor. McBride was in the kitchen, emptying a can of lentil soup into a pan, when she stooped to pick up the picture—and hesitated.

It was a 3 by 5 Polaroid photograph of … what? She picked up the picture from the floor, set it down on the desk, and cocked her head. Some kind of … thing. Unfamiliar, and yet—she’d seen it before. Where? It took a moment—then it hit her. She’d seen it on the floor of her apartment, spilled by whoever it was who’d trashed the place. Lying there in Nikki’s ashes, that tiny transparent
thing.
Which she thought was a contaminant of some kind, an artifact of the cremation process. And yet, Doctor Shaw had taken a picture of it. How?

She turned the photograph over, and found a notation scribbled on the back under the date stamp:

Her chest began to tighten with the realization that this wasn’t the artifact she’d found in her apartment. Or, rather, it was the same
kind
of thing—a translucent tube of glass shot
through with gold and silver wires—about as long and thick as a grain of rice. Different, but the same.

An implant.

Which meant that what had been done to Lew McBride had also been done to her sister. The tightening in her chest fused, turned into anger, and gave way to despair.

“Oh, Jesus!” she cried.

McBride looked up from the soup that he was stirring. “What’s the matter?”

She just shook her head, tears flying.

Seeing her unhappiness, he rushed to her side. And saw that she was looking at a photo of the implant. “Hey,” he said, giving her shoulder a squeeze, “take it easy. It’s gone. It’s out.”

“It’s on the floor of my apartment!”

Her outburst caught him by surprise. “What?”

“One of those! In Nikki’s ashes—just like that!”

He started to ask how it got there, but caught himself in time.

“It was in the urn from the funeral parlor,” she said, dragging a sleeve across her eyes. Then she giggled through her tears. “All that … bullshit!”

“What bullshit?” (He was trying to be encouraging.)

“About the Riedles. And ‘her overdose’! And the settlement they gave her. That’s why Eddie’s asset search went nowhere. None of it
happened.
It was all a lie—like what they did to you.” Suddenly, she wanted to kill someone. Specifically, she wanted to kill the person who’d turned her sister into the robot she’d met in the Nine West store, the girl who’d fried herself in the bathtub. Forget
closure.
“I’m going to crucify the son of a bitch who did this,” she swore.

McBride nodded, shrugged, went back to the kitchen. “Take a number,” he told her.

As Doctor Shaw had guessed, Sidney Shapiro had a listed number in the Jefferson County white pages. Seated cross-legged on the bed, drinking Genesee Ale, Adrienne worked
up the nerve to call him. Or tried to. Cold calls were not her forte. Never had been. “Maybe you should phone him,” she called out.

“God…
damnit!
” The expletive slipped through McBride’s gritted teeth as he reacted to burning himself on the handle of a cheap aluminum pan. Adrienne watched as he used his sleeve as a potholder, pulling it down over his hand. Then he maneuvered it over to the cold burner. “I don’t think so,” he replied.

Leaving the tiny kitchen, he carried the pan into their room, and poured the soup into the two white bowls on the table. Also on the table were a pair of square, plastic take-out salads, a sourdough baton and some foil wrapped patties of butter. The rose that he’d bought for her was standing on the table in an empty Coca-Cola can.

“I think we should doorstep the guy,” he told her. He gestured toward the table. “Dinner’s ready.”

She hopped off the bed and padded over in her bare feet. “You mean just go there? Why not call ahead?”

“Well, I’m sure that would be more polite, but … what are you going to tell him? That we want to talk about
mind
control? I don’t think so. I think we just go there.”

She shrugged. “I guess.”

He raised his bottle of beer. “To you,” he told her. “Thanks for …” he squinted, smiled a slightly crooked smile, “I don’t know. Just, thanks.”

They touched bottles. “Anytime,” she said and then flushed because it sounded so stupid. What did she mean—
anytime?
Anytime, what? She smiled back at him, and his eyes seemed to hold her there, so she kept on smiling. There was something different about him now—that lazy crooked smile, for instance, was really getting to her. She’d been attracted to him before in a vague, diffused way but now she could hardly look at him without feeling a … a buzz. It was the last thing she needed or wanted, a useless complication that could only be trouble.
Someone’s trying to kill me
, she thought,
not to mention him. I’m out of a job. I’m almost out of money. And I’m

thinking this guy and I should … what? Get it on? Good plan, Scout.

She bent down, dipped her spoon into the soup, filling it with the front-to-back motion she’d learned from an etiquette book, then put it in her mouth. It was so hot that she almost had to spit it out. But she didn’t, grabbing her beer instead, and gulping some down.

“You all right?” he asked.

“Hot,” she said. “I burned the roof of my mouth.” She guzzled her Genesee.

He leaned toward her. “I know a folk cure,” he said and for a moment, she thought he was going to kiss her, that
that
was ‘the folk cure.’ She felt it again, a sharp twist of desire. But he was leaning forward, not to kiss her, but to get up from his chair. He went to the kitchenette and returned with a glass of milk.
Get a grip
, she told herself, and took a sip.

He was smiling at her.

It’s the Stockholm Syndrome
, she thought.
Please God—let it be the Stockholm Syndrome.

*    *    *

In the morning, McBride did the driving.

On the way, Adrienne filled him in on Sidney Shapiro.

She’d gone out after dinner—right after dinner—the night before. McBride was tired, still suffering the lingering effects of his confinement at the hospital. And she hadn’t trusted herself to be in the same room with him, and so she had walked from the Mayflower to the library, where she’d cooled her heels, sitting in front of a stack of books about the CIA.

None of the books had that much to say about Shapiro, who’d presided over a program so “sensitive”—Adrienne took this to mean “criminal”—that virtually all its records had been destroyed. This, in the face of Senate hearings on “alleged human rights abuses by the U.S. intelligence community.”

Moving from index to index in each of the books, Adrienne had managed to put together a rough dossier, one that was filled with lacunae, but would have to suffice. “He studied at Cambridge,” she told McBride, reading from her notes. “Research
psychology, just like you. Then MIT. After that, he was in Korea for a while—no one knows what he was doing there, but he was supposed to be a civilian employee of the Army. (This was in ’53.) Then he came back to the States and set up something called the Human Ecology Fund. That was in New York.”

“Then what?” McBride asked.

“I’m not done. This Human Ecology thing was supposed to be private, but all its money came from the CIA. So he was an NOC.”

“A what?”

“An NOC! It means Nonofficial Cover.”

McBride glanced at her. “Where did you get this stuff?”

“At the library—when you were sleeping.”

“Hunh!”

“So, anyway, this fund was a CIA front. And what it did was, it funded behavioral studies—
secret
studies—in mind control. They called it Mk Ultra. Artichoke. Bluebird. Things like that.”

“And Shapiro was part of this?”

“He
ran
it for about ten years. Then they closed it down, and he took over as head of the Science & Technology Directorate at the CIA. But it was interesting what they did. They studied psychotropic drugs, hypnotism, telepathy, brainwashing, psychic driving—”

“I saw a documentary about it,” McBride told her. “On A&E. About a year ago. They were experimenting, testing hallucinogenic drugs on people they considered ‘fair game’—people in prisons and mental institutions, suspected communists, people who were breaking the law.”

“So, what happened? They got stoned, right?”

“Right. Only they didn’t know they were stoned. These weren’t exactly clinical trials. So most of them—what they thought was that they were sick or crazy.”

“Of course. That
is
what you’d think.”

“People lost their minds. And at least one guy lost his life.”

“Who?”

“A scientist named Olsen. His ‘colleagues’ slipped him a dose of LSD—and he lost it. Completely. Or so we’re told. A few days later, he threw himself out the window of his hotel.”

“Migod …”

“Or that’s what they said. According to the documentary, he probably had some help.”

“‘Help’?”

“There’s reason to think he was pushed.”

“Oh.”

They were crossing the Delaware Memorial Bridge. Below, the water looked metallic and sullen. Ahead of them, brake lights flared ruby-red as the traffic congealed before a phalanx of tollbooths.

“So it looks like you were right,” Adrienne said.

“About what?”

“Showing up on his doorstep. I don’t think a phone call would work.”

At the tollbooth, McBride pressed a bill into a woman’s outstretched hand. The air outside was cold, the woman’s hand warm, the moment they touched oddly precise, carved out of time. It struck him as a perfect microcosm of commerce, passage over a river in exchange for currency, a transaction that had taken place all over the world for centuries. The river below seemed huge, sinuous, alive and he could sense its moist, dank presence in the air despite the heavy aroma of diesel. Sounds welled up around him, the roar and rush of vehicles unfurling into the air as they accelerated away from the booth. McBride couldn’t get over how he felt, connected to his perceptions in a way that seemed brand-new. Even the drive down the Interstate which he knew was supposed to be tedious, struck him as exciting, the play of motion and space, the constant patterning and repatterning of the traffic a kind of jazz.

They checked into the Hilltop House, an old hotel perched on the mountainside in Harpers Ferry, overlooking the famous mountain gap where the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers
meet. The hotel was nearly empty—too late for fall color tours, too early for the holidays, and they had their pick of rooms. Once again, and for reasons of frugality, they took only one. Adrienne decided on a double with a view, and—she made a point of this—two beds.

An aging bellboy showed them to the room, and waited at the door until McBride pressed a bill into his papery hand. Once the old man was gone, the two of them stepped onto the balcony and looked out. From here, the rivers were visible only as occasional flashes of silver threaded between the dark mounded shapes of the wooded slopes.

The address they had for Shapiro was a P.O. box in the tiny, unincorporated town of Bakerton. They drove there—it was only a few miles from Harpers Ferry—figuring they’d ask around. How hard could it be to find someone who lived in a place whose population was sixty-three?

As it turned out, not hard at all.

Bakerton amounted to twenty or thirty houses scattered over a hundred acres of rolling woodland. Besides the houses, and a couple of trailers, there was a church, and a country store with a single gas pump in front of it.