Vitals (21 page)

I rested my hand on the freezer, looked down, and tugged at the padlock on the steel latch.

"Should we?" Lissa asked.

"Of course," I said. If anyone had a right, I thought, it was I. Lissa stood behind me, curious despite herself. I used the shiny steel key. The padlock snicked and fell open. I lifted the lid. A small cloud of vapor rose from the interior and quickly settled.

Lissa gave a shrill yelp and retreated.

I have seen dead human bodies before, in medical supply houses, on dissecting tables. I know what they look like. But I never get over the shock of seeing another. For me, a dead body means defeat. I bent over to look more closely. I had no doubt there was a reason for this

particular body to be there, in my brother's rented office, frozen, still wearing black socks and a tucked-up T-shirt and blue bikini briefs. There was also certain to be an explanation for why it had been autopsied. The top of the head had been sliced through and the skullcap removed, leaving most of the brain and peeled-back scalp to rest on a square of thick black-plastic sheeting. The torso had been opened in a single neat slice front to back, from the upper abdomen to the kidneys.

But this was no supply-house cadaver. Its flesh was pale blue and mottled green. I doubted that I would find lividity, blood pooled in the lower tissues, if I turned it over. It had probably been frozen after being dead less than a few hours.

I closed the lid and stepped back, bumping against the crowded central table. Took a deep breath to keep my stomach steady.

"We have to leave," Lissa insisted.

"Stand by the door and listen," I said, swallowing hard.

"I want to leave."

"Wait for me in the car, then," I said. "Keep an eye out."

"You can't touch anything!" she said in a muffled cry, knotting her fingers. "We should call the police now"

"Quiet, please!" I said between gritted teeth. I pulled up a chair to sit and think. I stared at the freezer, heard Lissa march away on the old gray carpeting in the hall.

Her footsteps returned.

"Did Rob do it?" she asked.

I shook my head, no way of knowing.

"If so, why?"

"Please, let me think."

Lissa pulled out a second chair and sat.

"Fingerprints," I warned. She took a fresh Kleenex from her purse and wiped where she had touched the chair.

"It's a lab, obviously," I said. "Maybe the body is someone who tried to hurt him. Kill him."

"Why cut it up?" Then, in a small but steady voice, Lissa added, "You should try thinking like your brother."

I straightened and walked around the room. Something nagged, some awareness fogged by more immediate shocks and events. I looked through the clutter of slides, trays, plastic bags, dishes, bottles of chemicals, and found a box of disposable synthetic lab gloves. Rob and I were allergic to latex. I pulled a pair from the box and slipped them over my hands.

Lissa handed me another Kleenex and I wiped the freezer handle. "Take those with us," I said. She stuffed them into the purse.

"Do you think someone's searched here already?" she asked. "It looks that way."

"Shh," I said, hoping to kindle that elusive spark of memory. I tried to look at the room through other eyes than my own, similar eyes, windows to a similar brain. I opened the small refrigerator. Thirty or so petri dishes had been stacked on the upper shelves. I slipped the cover off one dish and sniffed the pinkish, puddinglike contents.

"Yogurt," I said. Behind the dishes, in the back of the refrigerator, stood a small, apparently unopened cup of pina co lada Yoplait, one of my favorites.

One of Rob's favorites.

We looked at each other.

"He was trying to learn how they doped his food," I said. "He was culturing samples from things he might have eaten, or things he knew had been tampered with."

I closed the refrigerator and looked around with a slow pirouette, as if to catch a shadow off guard. My head hurt with the effort of trying to remember.

A file box about two feet long had been tucked in the corner beside the freezer. I pried up the lid with one finger. Inside were stuffed a pair of gray slacks, a soft knit shirt, pointy-toed black Italian shoes, a black-leather belt, and on top of them, an eels king wallet, some keys, and a pair of wire-rim sunglasses with small oval lenses.

I picked up the glasses. It all clicked. I opened the freezer and shoved my face and hands down into the cold mist.

"Don't!" Lissa said, her voice high. "You'll drop a hair or something." She must read mysteries, I thought. Could forensic specialists detect the difference between the hair from one twin and the hair from another? I strongly doubted it. Genetically, I was my brother.

I stared at the face, locked in a corpse's zazen, its frosted eyes indolent. The scalp, like a loose toupee, was covered with thick black hair.

"I've seen this guy before," I said. I lowered the sunglasses over the face, working one temple piece past a stiff fold of scalp and hair. With the top of his head removed, it should have been difficult to recognize him, but I focused on the sharp nose, the lean features, the glasses. Bingo.

A glance and poke in the ribs between two fit, wiry men standing at a bus stop in Berkeley. Not far from the market on Claremont Avenue, before the incident of the little man with the spray bottle.

The corpse in the freezer was one of those two men, alive more than a month after Rob's murder in New York.

"Rob couldn't have done this," I said, and dropped the lid. "Somebody else is involved."

"Banning?" Lissa asked.

I couldn't see Banning performing any kind of crude autopsy. "I don't think so. He's a book, not a knife."

It was very, very important that we get the hell out of the room, the building. With my gloves still on, I opened the door and looked up and down the hall. Empty. We stepped out and I closed and locked the door behind us.

We had to walk by the receptionist to reach the stairs. As we passed, she looked up and called out, "Are you from Mr. Escher's office? I have something for you."

Numbers. She had been reading numbers to her mother.

"Shit!" I grunted. I grabbed Lissa's hand and pulled her down the hall.

The receptionist popped from her doorway like a cuckoo out of a clock. She carried a big cardboard box. "Wait!" she shouted. "Someone left this!"

I pushed Lissa into the stairwell. She screamed and half jumped, half stumbled down the first flight, fetching up hard against the cinder-block wall.

I was mostly shielded by the corner when the explosion threw a ragged hammer of flame and debris down the hall. Nails, bolts, jagged splinters of glass and scraps of metal ripped the backs of my shoes and my shirt and shot gunned through the large window. The shock wave kicked me down the steps and I rolled beside Lissa. Smoke filled the stairwell, black and harsh like burning rubber. The valise dug into my diaphragm. I could hardly move, could not breathe.

An alarm went off and the sprinkler system opened up.

Lissa dragged me down the next flight of stairs. She was strong. At the bottom, I recovered enough to grab a rail and get to my feet. I lurched after her into the twilight.

The sidewalk and street were covered with glass and shrapnel. We looked up to see flames and steam blow out of the second floor in hot, eager rhythm, like the breath of a panting dragon.

The skinny salesman in the tight herringbone suit leaned against Lissa's car as if he had been waiting patiently the entire time. "You all right?" he asked. He tossed a well-used toothpick onto the lawn and pulled a pistol from his coat pocket, as casually as if it were a sales contract. Pointed the gun at me, not Lissa, and dressed his weasel face in a cool smile. A blob of spittle glinted on his chin. We backed away. "Goddamn it, just stay right here," he said, facing me. "You're making me lose some sales."

I flinched at the crack of a gun. That's it. I clutched my stomach. Nothing. No blood, no pain. I looked up from my belt just in time to see the man drop back a couple of steps, as if punched. A small black hole opened in his suit.

He still had enough blood in his brain to try to aim, but when he

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realized what had happened, the gun was the last thing he cared about. His legs gave way and he hit the ground with a grunt. He lay there kicking and making rough husking sounds.

"Oh, Jesus, oh, Mother" he said.

His face went empty but his foot kept twitching.

I had never seen a man die before.

Lissa was putting her pistol away in her purse when I spun around to look at her. Her face was white as a full moon in the light from the car dealership. Her blond hair and shoulders reflected orange from the puffing flames in the window above.

"Fucking amateur," she said. "Let's get out of here." She looked furious, and she scared the last dregs of hell right out of me.

I 7 I

"They have turned germs into comrades and allies. They speak to them, and through them. They have opened a telephone line into the human psyche. This is power beyond imagination."

--"Secret Report of Central Investigation Committee to Lavrenti Beria," 1937 (from the Golokhov papers, released by the Irkutsk University Committee for Openness and Historical Accuracy, August 16,2001)

JUNE 6 EL CA JON CALIFORNIA

I was a mess when Rob Cousins called.

The coffee machine had burned through a gasket and spouted hot water from all its joints. The house was a national park for dust bunnies. Our old white cat had skipped out to play pinochle with the coyotes and the coyotes had won. He had preferred Jame anyway.

About the only joy in my life was going to used bookstores, and most of my favorites had closed down to sell on-line. Janie haunted the kitchen so I rarely cooked. The lawn was so high I didn't dare push a mower through it. I spent mornings in such a goddamned funk I could hardly get out of bed.

Evenings were the best. At dusk, the summer heat dropped to a dull furnace glow and a sea breeze glided in through the canyons like angel's breath. The swamp cooler shut off at seven-thirty or eight and the house became quiet. Outside, the stars rose over the black hills and the crickets started their thermometer chirrups.

I was sixty-three years old. My book on guerrilla submarine operations in the Philippines was an inch deep and dead in the water. After all my research, I still couldn't find the story. I was tired of writing about brave young men fighting a good war sixty years ago. Writing seemed to be through with me.

I couldn't see any future, and that made the past useless.

I sat in my overstaffed chair with the cat-frayed leather arms and sipped a martini. I don't like gin, but Janie did. After the martini, I planned to have a beer, then, an hour later, a Scotch. I'm not suicidal, so I always stopped at three. Three drinks sufficed to make me feel sad rather than frantic.

The windows were shiny black and the shaded lamp by the chair cast a warm glow over everything. By nine o'clock, grief was starting to feel almost comfortable.

My daughter lived in Minneapolis. Always a chameleon, she had acquired the distinctive Minne-sooa-tah Norwegian-Chippewa accent after six years and seldom called. My son in Baltimore couldn't even be at his mom's funeral. He had claimed to be sick with seafood poisoning. Maybe he was.

Janie and I had just sent off the kids' unclaimed stuff to Goodwill and started thinking about our second honeymoon when the stroke felled her. The hell with relationships. I would never again fall in love, never again trust a woman not to get up and walk into another room and die on me.

I would haunt the dark like the lone white barn owl I saw at night in the backyard, scissoring mice in the tall grass.

There is nothing sadder than a rugged son of a bitch minus his life partner.

The phone rang. Janie had bought one of the cordless kind but I kept an old Bakelite Ma Bell special by my chair. It had once been used by Admiral Halsey. I answered and a young man's voice said, "Is this Ben Bridger? The author of Uncommon Gravest"

"It is," I said, and pushed my chair forward so I could lower my voice to a dignified baritone. "Who's this?"

"My name is Rob Cousins. I'm a biologist."

"That's nice," I said.

"I read your books when I was a kid. The old Ballantine and Bantam paperbacks. I think I may still have a few somewhere. They were great."

"Thank you," I said. "What can I do for you?"

"You wrote a book with Beria's aide, the one who escaped getting shot, right?"

"Yeah." Waltzing with the Beast, Houghton Mifflin, 1982. Four printings in hardback and a couple of paperback editions.

"Do you know a writer named Rudy Banning?"

"Used to outsell me four to one."

"And now?"

"Can't get published to save his life. He's a crank."

"Totally unreliable?"

"I guess he pulls up some papers at the National Archives now and then."

"What do you think happened to him?"

"Not my business, Mister ..."

"Cousins. I'm in El Cajon now. On Broadway, I think. If it's not too late, I'd like to bring some dinner and talk with you."

Little warning bells. "It is late," I said. "How do you know I haven't had dinner?"

"I don't. I haven't eaten since breakfast, though. I could bring dessert."

"Cheesecake?"

"Sure."

"What do you want to know, Mr. Cousins?"

"I have to confirm some things Rudy Banning told me. They could be important... to me. Also, to a historian like you."

If he was one of Banning's little goose-stepping admirers, if he came over with a Luger or a Mauser, I could tick him off with the lyric about Hitler's lone testicle, and he'd freak and blow my brains out. That wouldn't be a bad way to go. Quick, with my name in the paper. The Laphraoig was getting low, anyway.

"I actually haven't had dinner," I said.

"I'm near a Vietnamese takeout. What can I get for you?"

"Some of those things like egg rolls or lump ia I said. "Ph6, with tendon and sausage and cooked beef. Lots of basil and jalapeno slices. Forget the bean sprouts."

I gave him directions to the house.

Outside, I heard the big barn owl hunting in the tall grass, wings whispering like little geishas.

Cousins arrived about an hour later and we ate on the back porch, with the yellow bug lights on. He was a slightly built fellow, not quite thirty, handsome, mousy brown hair thinning at the temples, but it looked good on him. Pale, a little sickly, his forehead damp, but no goose stepper. Eyes intense and dark green, the left eyelid angled down a little, speech quick, hands with long fingers like a piano player's.

"What do you know about Lydia Timashuk?" he asked after I had finished my Sara Lee cheesecake.

"Timashuk," I said. "Caught Stalin's ear in the thirties. Said all the best scientists and doctors in the Soviet Union should work together to make Comrade Stalin live longer. Stalin liked that, but Timashuk was a fraud. She informed on the Jewish doctors in 1952. Most of them were shot."

Cousins nodded and smiled. I had the feeling I had passed the first test. "She was a fraud. But have you ever heard of a researcher named Golokhov? Maxim Golokhov?"

"Maxim Gorky, yes. Golokhov, no."

"How about a project called Silk? Started before the war."

I knew which war he meant. "No ... Unless it was one of the projects to make artificial silk. For parachutes and stuff."

"Anything involving Stalin, research on mind control, Lake Baikal, and Irkutsk University? Starting in the 1920s?"

"Nope. But that's hardly authoritative. They're still uncovering tons of paper every month over there, files on this or that. Not as organized as Nazi files, but every bit as damning. Stalin was some piece of work."

"What can you tell me about Rudy Banning?"

"He was the best."

Cousins smiled. "That's what he says."

"You're working with him?"

"I don't know what the relationship is, exactly."

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Cousins seemed nervous but stable. The crickets had fallen silent. The house timbers creaked as they shrank. I thought I heard footsteps in the kitchen. I often hear footsteps in the kitchen at that time of night.

It was good to have somebody to talk to.

"Rudy's books were pretty good once," I said. "He had a knack for sniffing out rare documents. But something happens after you dig into the thousandth official archive of intolerable brutality. Spiritual evil, as they say. But it's not demons, it's flesh-and-blood people doing the unimaginable, then recording it like you and I balance our checkbooks. You come to mistrust everyone, and finally the paranoia kicks in. It can always happen again, you know. Ordinary people are out there waiting for the orgy to start. They lick their lips, waiting for the hate to flow. You study the twentieth century long enough, you want to pack a gun."

I stretched out my arms and flicked off a mosquito. The neighbors had a stagnant koi pond about three hundred yards down the road, and old folks have thin skin. "Anyway," I said, reaching my point, "Banning is possessed by the specter of Adolf Hitler. Figuratively speaking."

"I think he'd agree with you," Cousins said. He had brought in a blue backpack stuffed full. He reached into it.

I looked at the backpack with vague longing, but I already knew he wasn't the type to put an end to my troubles. He removed not a Luger but a picture book, Blondi, Dog of Destiny. I had seen it before-in the bargain bin of Wahrenbrock's in San Diego, marked down to twenty-five cents.

"This is what Silk did to Banning," Cousins said. "He doesn't know how crazy he actually is. Neither do I."

I read the publisher's address. "White Truth Press, Ojai, California. UFO and would-be-Aryans. Pitiful."

"But what I'm after is serious," Cousins said. "Banning found some files in the National Archives in the 1990s, and when he read

about my research in a magazine, he got in touch with me. His material was interesting, so I went to see him. Ever since, a lot of peculiar stuff has been happening."

I stared at him for a few seconds, long enough to make him feel uncomfortable.

"Look," I said. "I've read The Odessa File. I wish I had written it, this house would be a lot nicer." And maybe I could have gotten better medical care for Janie. "But I'm not much for Nazi conspiracies. I don't believe in trivializing real horror with skinhead fantasies."

Cousins looked dismayed, but he was resilient. He said, "It's not Nazis and it's not just Communists. It's biologists, some of the smartest people in the world. Pioneers, in their way. And it's really important to me, Mr. Bridger."

"Ben," I said.

"I need confirmation. That's all I'm asking. A little help from someone who taught me history when I was a kid."

He was so sincere, and his voice so level. I didn't want to be in the house alone. The kitchen was definitely haunted. Maybe I was the crazy one here. Besides, Cousins reminded me of my son. I really missed my son.