Death Benefit (32 page)

On hearing the words, something in Pia’s brain fizzed into life. A laboratory animal learns to stop engaging in a certain behavior, like touching a red button, if it gets a painful shock every time, even if previously it got a reward, like a piece of food. In Pia’s mind, there was a connection between protestations of affection and pain. She had learned that the people who said those words would cause her pain, and should be avoided, like an electric shock.

Pia pressed the elevator button again, as it appeared that the car was stuck on the eighth floor. She said nothing.

“Our relationship can’t be totally one-sided.”

“What do you mean, ‘relationship’ . . . ? Look, George, this isn’t the time or the place for this.”

“When is the time, Pia? I’ve wanted to tell you I love you for years.”

The elevator finally arrived, the doors opened, and a cluster of students noisily piled out. A party had started in someone’s room and now was moving to a bar up on Broadway.

George pulled Pia aside as the door closed. She rolled her eyes.

“George, come on. Not now.”

“I’m sorry, but I have to say it. I know you don’t want to hear this, but I don’t understand you.”

“That makes two of us.”

“But we need each other, don’t you think? I know I need you.”

“I don’t know what that means—to ‘need’ someone. Someone needing me, I don’t want that responsibility.”

The second elevator arrived with a straggling student who hurried to catch up with his friends. Pia got in the car and held the door for George.

“Get in, George, Jesus.”

Pia punched the eleventh floor for her room and seven for his. Message delivered. George reluctantly got in. Pia’s mind was already full of competing problems—Rothman, the Sisters, Africa, the rest of her life—and now here was another one. She wondered what it was like to think about someone constantly as George said he did of her. It was an alien concept. She glanced at George, who was looking at the floor. She had no idea what he was thinking or feeling. The elevator stopped on seven and Pia reached out and pressed the hold button. George hesitated for a moment, than stepped out.

“Good night, George,” Pia said.

George just nodded as the doors closed. To Pia he looked pathetic.

 

 

G
eorge knew something about loss. His own father, Morgan Wilson, died when George was three, and no matter how hard he tried, George couldn’t really remember anything specific about him other than a vague sense of contentment. He did have a few vague memories, but they’d been pieced together from photographs shown to him by his mother, Jean. There was one silent home movie of a time Jean and Morgan took George to see his grandparents, Sally and Preston, in Arizona. George had watched the film over and over and his father always looked impossibly young and endearing. In the short film Morgan is holding George on his lap and alternately kisses him on the cheek and hugs him. Morgan’s absence had caused George a degree of melancholy similar to the melancholy he was feeling at that moment.

George got up from his bed where he’d flopped after Pia’s rebuff. He needed to get out of his room if only for a short interval. There was always the vending machine room on the first floor. He needed to see people, normal people, and there were usually students getting sodas or bags of chips.

As George headed toward the elevators, he tried to concentrate on how much he was loved by his family. He’d always had that to fall back on whenever he felt lonely. He knew that Pia did not have an equivalent situation, which made her behavior even more confusing. Why did she so consistently reject the love that he wanted to share with her and finally had the courage to voice? It just didn’t make sense.

George slapped the down button. Almost as if the car had been sitting there waiting for him, the elevator doors opened. Inside was Will McKinley, perhaps the only person in the world who could have made George feel even lonelier.

“George!” Will said. “What a coincidence. You heading down for a snack? Hop in!” Will took George’s arm and pulled him in. The ground-floor button had already been pressed. George lacked the strength to resist.

“What’s the matter, George? You look terrible.”

“I’m just tired. It’s been that kind of day.”

“How’s Pia? Have you seen her? She must have taken what happened to Rothman real hard.”

“She did.”

“Lesley and I tried to call her but she’s not picking up.”

“She’s not great at staying in touch with people,” George said.

The elevator reached the ground floor and Will guided George off.

“Listen, George, if there’s anything I can do to help Pia, just let me know. Really. We want her to get through this in one piece, she’s a great girl.”

George simply nodded. Will walked away toward the vending room. When he realized George wasn’t accompanying him, he turned and waved to George to follow.

“Come on! My treat.”

George sighed, wearily turned, and pressed the button once more to call the elevator. He wanted company but not Will’s company.

 

 

T
he moment the elevator doors had closed on George, Pia had already relegated him to his proper place in her mind, well down the list of her immediate concerns. She didn’t like being abrupt with him, but she didn’t want to get into a long-drawn-out conversation either. She was exhausted from not sleeping well the previous night. Unfortunately, when she reached her floor, she had a bit of bad luck. She had run into Lesley and had had to have a conversation about Rothman and Yamamoto. Curious if Lesley had any interesting thoughts, Pia had tolerated the chat, but after ten minutes or so, when it was evident Lesley was not about to add anything significant, Pia broke it off.

Pia put the key in the lock and opened her door, walked in, and hooked the door with her right heel to slam it shut. In complete darkness, she felt the wall with her left hand to find the light switch and flicked it on. With her right hand she tossed her keys in the general direction of the desk. All Pia wanted to do was take a quick shower before going to bed. She’d been on the go all day and tomorrow wasn’t going to be any quieter with a planned visit to the OCME.

Pia walked over to the window and closed the blinds. She took off her lab coat and tossed it over the arm of her reading chair. Next she removed her sweater and laid it on top of the jacket. She opened her closet door and kicked her shoes directly inside, first the left, then the right. Next she shucked off her black skirt and then her bra and let them fall to the floor. Pia couldn’t wait to get into a hot shower. She put her hand on the bathroom door and thought it was odd that it was closed—she never closed the bathroom door, even when she was using the toilet.

Before Pia could process another thought, the door was yanked open away from her and the handle wrenched out of her hand. A tall figure materialized in the doorway and put the heel of his hand on Pia’s breastbone and pushed her hard to the ground. Pia’s head snapped back and smacked against the floor. A reflex cry rose in her throat, but it was choked off by the man, who was straddling her now with his knees on her arms, his left hand over her mouth. Pia tried to clear her head, but her ears were ringing. The man kneeling on her was wearing a balaclava, and she could see a second figure, obscured by the first. He was also hooded. Both wore hospital security uniforms.

The first man struggled to keep Pia still. He reached behind him with his right hand and the second man handed him a roll of duct tape. The first man looked back again and waved the tape.

“Cut me a piece,” he said in heavily accented English, and his colleague obliged. He freed Pia’s mouth, took the strip of tape in both hands, and clamped it down over Pia’s mouth before she could let out more than a stifled screech.

“Stop moving. We’re not going to hurt you,” the first man said. Pia wriggled once more but stopped. She was struggling to get enough oxygen through her nose and her head was throbbing where she had hit it on the floor. Her arms were getting numb where the man was kneeling on them. She looked into his eyes and nodded.

“Okay. I’m going to let you up. Don’t do anything stupid.”

The man got to his feet, digging his knees into the fleshy part of Pia’s arms as he did so. He stood back and she got up. She felt small. She was wearing only a pair of panties, and even though they were wearing balaclavas, she knew the eyes of the two men were moving up and down her body. She was going to be raped, she was certain. Pia raised her arms to rub her sore triceps and cover her breasts.

Pia thought,
It’s only ten feet to the door
.

Pia thought,
They’re not expecting me to do anything
.

Pia thought,
I don’t want to be raped. Not again
.

Pia looked from one man to the other and then down at the floor. She wanted them to relax, even slightly. Then she got up on her tiptoes, tapped her right foot on the floor behind her, and in one move, using her arms first for balance and then for forward thrust, she drove her right foot heel-first into the front man’s groin. He doubled over and staggered back and into his colleague, and Pia stood square at once, moved forward and reached over and hit the second man in the face twice, boxing jabs that fit the narrow space she was in. Both men were hurt but not enough. Pia got in a couple more kicks that would leave bruises, but the two men quickly regained momentum and charged her. The first man, his groin aflame, feinted a couple of times, then smashed Pia in the jaw with a right hook, knocking her unconscious.

 

 

W
hen Pia woke up her head hurt like hell, and she couldn’t move her limbs. She understood why: She was duct-taped to her chair, her arms bound behind her and her ankles fixed together. Pia’s eyes were barely open, but she could make out one of the men coming toward her, his arm moving back and then quickly forward. She flinched, then took a face-f of cold water that the man had thrown over her using the Tupperware container she sometimes fixed oatmeal in.

“That’s what you do when I say do nothing stupid, huh?” The man’s concealed face was very close to hers. His blue eyes bored into Pia’s. She tried to speak, or at least snort.

“You are a good fighter, but we are more experienced, and there are two of us. We have respect for you because we are family men. But we know some young men who are less, what is the word? Civilized. They are, in fact, animals. If they were here now and not us, then God help you.”

The man was speaking in a whisper. The fight and the overturned furniture that resulted had prompted the upstairs neighbor to bang on her floor to ask for quiet. The men didn’t want to try the neighbor’s patience.

“I say this only once. We are here to give you a message. Stop what you are doing. Stop asking questions. Your doctor was careless and got himself and the other doctor infected, and he put the whole medical center in a compromised position. It will be dealt with quickly and quietly and everyone will move on.”

Pia was rocking back and forth in her chair, her eyes wide with fury. It was her rebelliousness surfacing.

“Stop rocking!”

Pia didn’t stop. The man slapped her in the face, not hard but well placed enough to make her jaw throb even more severely than it had been. Pia sat still.

“You will be watched. Not by us, by our friends. If you keep meddling, if you call the police, our other friends, the animals, will come and take you away and you will ask them to kill you after a couple of days. You will beg them. You understand?”

Pia stared at the man. He moved even closer than before and the rough material of the balaclava touched her skin. She could feel his hot breath through the damp wool. He spoke in barely a whisper.

“You understand?”

Pia waited a beat, then nodded.

“You will tell no one we were here. If you talk with anyone here, like that boy you are with, they will be killed too. If you go to the police or the medical authorities, you will be killed. It’s easy. Just stop, go about your life, and all this goes away.”

The man stood up. His colleague stepped forward and jabbed the needle of a syringe hard into Pia’s thigh. She gasped at the pain, then fell unconscious almost at once. The men tore off the duct tape binding her, leaving her skin red and swollen where it had been in contact with the tape. When they pulled the tape from her mouth it tugged at the wound on her jaw and further opened a tear in her lip. Blood trickled down her chin. The first man wiped it off with a tissue he got from a box on Pia’s dresser. He pocketed it after using it. He picked her up and laid her on the bed with her head over the side. He knew that the drug he’d given her had the tendency to cause vomiting.

The men removed their balaclavas and prepared to leave. If Pia had been conscious she would have seen at once that the face of one of the men, the leader, was marked with a cleft lip. The other man had a peculiarly and memorably pointed nose. The first man cracked the door open and, seeing an empty hall, quickly exited the room, followed by the second man. They put on their official hats and, adjusting their uniforms, made their way quickly to the stairs.

 

 

P
ia woke up in stages. First, when it was still night, she skimmed the surface of consciousness but quickly fell back into the darkness. Then, later, it had become light outside, and she was aware of her own breathing and a sharp pain in the back of her head and a throbbing along her jaw. Finally, she awoke and was hysterical—there were men in her room, chasing after her, she had to get away. She tried to get up, but her body wasn’t obeying her commands. She slumped back on the bed and closed her eyes.