Rabid (5 page)

One sip, and you’ve got two years before your body dissolves in tumors.

~~~~~

In the Sloan lab, Danna sidled up to Joe while he bent over, loading tiny drops of blue-dyed glycoprotein into a gelatinous slab. “O’Malley’s graduation party is tonight. You going?”

O’Malley rode a black motorcycle, had a beer vending machine rigged to accept AA tokens, and thought he was the wildest player on the planet. Fate had granted him the name of a cartoon alley cat. Everyone talked about him.

Danna’s father was the Lutheran minister in a small Iowa town and her mother was a teacher, and the gossip in the molecular biology department shocked
her
. The hardy stock of gossip grapevine tendrilled the university buildings in lieu of more prestigious ivy.

Joe click-ejected a tip into the waste bucket. “Is Leila going?” Joe asked.

“I don’t know. Dr. S. just called her into his office again. Is she dating anyone?”

Joe stabbed the tip box with the steak knife-sized micropipetter. After he and Leila had stopped sleeping together last year, he hadn’t seen her leave the bar with anyone, but Leila was secretive to the point of subterfuge. “I don’t know who she’s dating these days.”

“Do you think she’ll go to O’Malley’s party?”

“What, are you looking for herd immunity?” Joe filled a well with glycoprotein.

“I don’t want to be there alone with O’Malley and his rugby friends.”

“I’ll go. I’ll bet Leila will. She gets on well with O’Malley. Did you hear about that guy at Berkeley who got Herpes B?”

She smoothed her hair. “Macaques are all latently infected with Herpes B, green monkeypox, and everything else. I’m grossed out that it peed in his eye. I’m glad we work with mice.”

“He’s got to take four
grams
of acyclovir every day for the rest of his life, otherwise the encephalitis will kill him.” Joe shook his head. “Herpes encephalitis. That’s a bad way to go.”

~~~~~

Leila de-gloved, pulled off her lab coat, and perfunctorily knocked on Conroy’s open office door while she walked in. Stripped down to street clothes, the air cooled her arms and hands.

Conroy’s face was tight around his eyes,
stricken
. He said, “I have to cancel on dinner tonight.”

She kicked the door closed. “We weren’t supposed to have dinner tonight. Are you all right, Conroy?”

If anything, his eyes drooped further. “Yeah. Fine.”

He was hiding something as obviously as the morning after she had first seduced him, when he had stuttered like Humbert Humbert confronted with a nymphet. This time, something had snakebitten him. She blurted, “Are you HIV-positive?”

Conroy blinked and a small, dismissive smile curved his lip. “No.”

Leila’s hand, clutching the front of Conroy’s desk, cramped. Everyone in the lab lurked just outside the door, and her voice dropped in case someone walked by. “So what’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” His eyebrows clenched hard when he scowled.

He was really upset about something.

All this talk about dinners and emotional melodrama was ridiculous. She didn’t want to deal with it. “Fine, then. Let’s take a break from the fucking.”

He slapped the desk. “Are you threatening me?”

He was acting as if they had a
relationship
. Jesus, he might end up stalking her, and she might have to grab her gun and shoot him when he broke into her apartment in the dead of night and she woke up to him masturbating over her.

She leaned on his desk. “Get a hold of yourself.”

Conroy stared at his huge computer screen. “I don’t want to take a break.”

“Then stop this crap.” Leila tapped his monitor. He looked up. His eyes were startlingly, vibrantly blue, like an empty cable television channel. “Do you actually need anything for the grant?”

“It was a pretext.”

“Fine, then.” Leila opened the office door. “I’ll email you that gel,” she said as she left.

At her bench, Leila donned her tie-dyed lab coat and struggled into sticky nitrile gloves the color of Conroy’s bright blue eyes.

O’Malley’s graduation party started at ten. She should toss her handcuffs into her purse. They had broken O’Malley’s pair.

~~~~~

That evening, Dante paced.

Books, magazines, and papers packed the mismatched library bookshelves: rococo teak, oak veneer, bowing metal, and raw lumber stacked with slump block.

A knock creaked open the door.

Mrs. Sloan called through the crack, “Father Dante?”

“
Si?
Yes?” Mrs. Sloan walked in with a man. Moderate lines creased the man’s middle-fifties face. Dante ventured, “Mr. Sloan?”

“
Dr.
Sloan,” the man said.

His pompous attempt to establish authority annoyed Dante. He did not rise to it. “Father Dante Petrocchi-Bianchi. Pleased to meet you.” Dante opened his hand toward the two plush chairs. “Sit down, please?”

Mrs. Sloan sat and stared at her clenched hands in her lap. Dante had thought that she might be smug because she had initiated the counseling, but she seemed despondent.

Her husband crossed his legs and twitched his foot. “This’ll have to be short. I have some work to finish. I’m a doctor and a professor.” Sloan drew himself up in his chair. “I work on neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Synucleopathies.” Haughty chin juts punctuated his rehearsed speech.

Oh, good Lord. This man was
that
C. Sloan, the American neurologist who dribbled trivial research into good but not first-rate journals. Neuroscience is a large field, but everyone knows everyone at least by reputation.

Dante settled himself in the chair opposite them and stretched his tired legs. “Alzheimer’s is an amyloidopathy and a tauopathy, not a synucleopathy.”

Sloan’s head dropped and his jaw cracked. “You’re in neuroscience?”

If Dante had been less enraged at the evil of the world or if he had eaten lunch, he might have been kinder, as befits a priest. “My research concerns molecular psychiatry. I have a paper in last month’s
JAMA
,” a better journal that Sloan published in. Dante did not need to mention his recent papers in
Nature
and
Science
. He left Sloan something to discover.

Sloan’s fidgeting foot stopped twitching. “Wait, you’re
D.M.
Petrocchi-Bianchi?”

Smoothly, from behind his steepled fingers, he said, “I prefer ‘Father Dante.’ It is nice to meet you, Mr. Sloan.” He stood and opened the door for them to leave. “You must be in a hurry to return to your lab. You are quite tardy, so we cannot speak today. However, please send Dinah and Christina in.”

“Christine,” Mrs. Sloan said.

“Yes, excuse me.” A headache was forming behind his left eye. Dante pinched the bridge of his nose. “Good night, Mr. Sloan.”

~~~~~

Sister Mary Francis walked Dinah and Christine under the cathedral’s vulturing saints to the library. The girls’ ponytails twitched above their plaid jumpers.

Earlier, Sister had tried to remove some books from the library, but Father Dante had raged that
no one
was to go in there.

She complained to Father Samual about this new priest not knowing his place, but Sam had shushed her and told her that the new priest was from the Vatican and that he was God’s man. Sam wouldn’t even tell her what he meant or why he was suddenly nervous and pale.

And now she was throwing two of her own little girls into the priest’s lair.

At the door, she dropped to one knee.

Their mother stood aside, struck mute.

Sister said, “Just answer his questions. If you need anything, you call out, and I’ll be right outside the door.”

They nodded.

Father Dante opened the door. His curt chin jut suggested anger.

She ushered the girls into the library. The wooden door closed, but stopped before the door hit the jamb. Father Dante’s handspan measured the distance the door remained open, about nine inches, and then withdrew.

~~~~~

Conroy rocked on his feet. His wife sat in a pew and regarded the lurid, crucified Christ suspended above the altar.

The Protestants were smart to remove Christ from the cross and contemplate the abstract form of the torture device. Not that he understood them, either.

He leaned on the pew where Beverly was sitting and asked her, “Why is he talking to the kids?”

“Something about the school.”

“I don’t like it.” He didn’t like that priest or his long black cassock or his long, black hair. The guy looked like a hippie or a Renaissance relic. “You didn’t tell me he was a scientist.” He had looked like a fool all day, first with Leila threatening him, now this.

Beverly shrugged and kept her eyes on Christ.

“I’ll PubMed him, see if he’s really who he says he is.”

His wife didn’t answer.

“So what’s the matter with you? I thought you wanted counseling.”

The overhead lights, dimmed to resemble candlelight, reflected off gold strands in her brown hair. She smoothed her beige skirt. “We’ll talk later.”

“There’s something else?” There was always something fucking else. Maybe he could find Leila’s hidden stash of scotch at the lab.

~~~~~

At choir practice that evening, Bev adjusted the piano bench and limbered up her fingers with a few scales. Minor keys suited her mood: dour, wintry music. The claxon fifth and descending minor scale were from Lieutenant Kije’s Suite, Prokofiev, snow falling on spilled Russian blood.

Arriving choir members blew in, laughing in the January chill: happy, silly people who didn’t snoop where they shouldn’t. Bev stretched her lower back, which had tightened while she had crushed drives in the golf simulator at the pro shop that afternoon.

Father Dante strode out of the library toward the piano.

Bev gathered the sheet music she had been using, and the paper slipped sideways and fluttered. She snatched the sheaf and managed to catch half. The rest splashed on the floor.

Father Dante was beside her, sweeping the pages together. He asked, “Could you choose the music for the Mass this week?”

“But I wouldn’t know what to pick.” She took the pages from his hands. She might get the hymns wrong. She might ruin the Mass.

“Afterwards, you can tell me what they are.” He sat beside her on the piano bench, which was far too small for two adults and her thigh rested against his black cossack over his legs. He handed her a list of names. “These people, are any of them in the choir?”