Vital Parts (59 page)

Winona distressfully awaited an answer. Damn her, he was just ready to pull his hole in after him.

“Yes, dear.”

She breathed heavily. “That's a weight off my conscience. I try to do the right thing, but it isn't always easy to tell what it is. Like today. I thought I ought to go and get an abortion, where Blaine sent Julie, because I heard him telling her in his room last week, but when I got there I couldn't go in. Some voice inside just told me not to, told me I should have the baby and love it, not have it murdered before it was even born just because it would be painful. So it was thinking about that, that I got hit by the truck. And that brought on my period, anyway. So there's no problem now.” She grinned and said again: “So everything's just fine now.”

Reinhart's chair sagged somewhat on the right. Looking down, he saw he had bent the metal leg he had not been aware he was clutching. His bandages had unraveled. He still had the great strength of yore. Once he had killed a man with it, broken his back. He would never do it again. He would not locate this newfound friend and destroy him, because though it could be managed, it could not be rightly done without publicity. Stealthy poison would not serve, nor a silenced weapon. Sheer brutality was called for, flesh-tearing, bone-breaking, head-crushing, the making of a man into a heap of offal, and doing it so that the object would, till the end, feel the how and know the why.

Revenge, pure and beautiful in its orgy. For Winona, who was quite happy now, had no interests to represent. Indeed she would be damaged when the news got out: you could not beat a man to death in seclusion nowadays; there were no private, soundproof places. Providing you could even find him. You could not ask Winona for identifying features of
your friend
, whose name you already possessed. So you killed him and revealed him, to her, as a statutory rapist, in submitting to whom she had not done the “right thing.” But then you also killed Winona.

“It is, isn't it, Daddy?” she asked. “Just let things take their course, and they will come out all right, like you have always said. Only, I wish you still lived at home.” Her sweet smile became reflective. “I guess you are still the only person I can talk to.”

Reinhart caught sight again of the breech-clouted Christ, hanging on the plastic cross. Whether He, or he, had been fake or freak or real McCoy, winner or loser, was largely another matter of definition.

“How would you like to live with me until you go off to the nunnery?” he asked. “In the Presidential suite of the Shade-Milton for a few days until we can find a nice little apartment?”

“I wouldn't get in your way, Daddy. If you had business to discuss I would go to my room.” Her fat cheeks swelled as her lower lip oozed out. It was Winona's expression for brain-scouring thought. “You could even watch TV after I went to bed, and I wouldn't complain next morning.”

“Darling, that's the best offer I have ever had.”

He could also tell her some of the things he had never got around to, such as that a pregnancy does not necessarily develop overnight.

“Carl!” Bob Sweet shouted at him as he entered the lab. “I've been trying to get hold of you all day. We've—”

“I'm looking for you, too,” said Reinhart. “The phone number here is unlisted, and I didn't have it.”

Sweet began to speak, but Reinhart stopped him. “I'll get right to the point. The deal is off, Bob. It turns out that I am worth more alive than frozen.”

“Carl—” Sweet was agitated, as Reinhart had expected.

“It's no use, Bob. I know about the sacks of gravel. If you told me they were cocoa beans, it figures you have allowed other people to assume the same thing. Like the bank that gives you loans on them. It might seem impossible that a professional financial institution would not carefully inspect the collateral, but then I remember a couple of years ago some guy in the salad-oil business filled his storage tanks with water and bilked half of Wall Street, including the First National City Bank of New York and the American Express Company. I guess all it takes is nerve.”

“Carl, that doesn't matter now,” Sweet snapped, in his urgent style that no longer stirred Reinhart.

“Right. I am disaffiliating. I don't want to be frozen, at least not for some years and not then unless you get somebody who seems more reliable than a Swiss-German fanatic. Even though he was in a concentration camp.”

Bob seized Reinhart's lapels, but the big man broke the hold with a jujitsu thing he had learned in the Army.

“And, furthermore, there's no such thing as a black belt in kung fu,” Reinhart said. “That was another of your alterations of truth. If I pushed you around in high school, I'm sorry. But, Jesus Christ, that was in 1939 or '40. How long can you hold a grudge?”

“Carl, Carl!”

“No, Bob, I won't listen to any more of your cunning. Also, I don't intend to return what is left of the money after buying the Jag and a few other things, and I'm going to stay at the Shade-Milton on the company account until I can find another place to live. My daughter is going to join me there. I'll have them open up the door to the bedroom next door where the Secret Service men slept when Eisenhower stayed there.”

Now it was Reinhart who grabbed Sweet, pulling him up close and looking down as if he were a child. And like a child who finds himself being lectured, Bob hung his head between his shoulders.

“Do you know,” Reinhart said, really oblivious to Sweet, “all this while I thought the big problems were my wife and son. Not so: nasty people are easily handled. I mean, it may not be easy to accept the fact that your wife of twenty-two years is and has always been a bitch—not under the aspect of eternity, or anything like that, but simply vis-à-vis me, who am all I can speak for. And the reason she is has largely, I am certain, to do with my own character. To Harlan Flan she may very well be a yielding, receptive sort of woman.”

Bob was struggling. Reinhart had him imprisoned, a big bandaged hand on each of Sweet's slender arms.

“And Blaine,” said Reinhart. “The way it has worked out is a total standoff: we each defy absolutely the other's idea of what we should be. Something clean and perfect about that. We are such total enemies that if either of us did not exist, the other would have to invent him. We may be, in fact, figments of each other's imagination as is. Everybody needs a red herring to throw pursuers off his trail.”

Bob broke away from Reinhart's right hand and threw an ineffectual left that grazed Reinhart's temple. Reinhart knocked him to the lab floor with a blow to the solar plexus.

While Sweet was doubled up, gasping, Reinhart bent over and continued, tightening the loose bandage.

“So both of them, Gen and Blaine, are seen as taking their place as figures in the rich tapestry, as the fellow says. Life would not have been the same without them, but can be lived in their absence. Does that sound heartless?”

Bob made grunting noises.

“It is. It is virtually impossible to be absolutely generous to someone you love: the time will always come when their interest is served only at the cost of yours. If you acquiesce in it, they will have contempt for you. The old power play. The world is made up not of winners and losers, but of followers and leaders. The divine right of kings is a much more natural principle than that all men are equal.”

Understandably enough, Sweet was still totally occupied with himself.

“The really sinister person is the saint,” said Reinhart. “With whom every association insures your being further damned. If you think I pity Winona, you are wrong. She is utterly devoid of a sense of evil. I don't know how she got that way. Gen and I are both masters of malice. She scares me. She makes me feel more inadequate than Blaine ever did. She will stumble through life, corrupting many a soul with her goodness, mine first of all. I expect eventually to burn in hell, so it would be copping out to begin it at this point, deal or no deal.” Reinhart laughed. “You see, already, because of her I am welshing on my word, my Dad's idea of the worst sin a man could commit, but then, unlike me, he was a man of honor.”

Reinhart helped Bob to his feet.

“Sorry about that. You might be a crook, but I know you are serious about the freezer program, the end of which may indeed justify the means: some do. I don't question your good faith. I'll tell you what I'll do: I'll make up a will by which my body will be donated to you when I die a natural death. If I don't outlast you, that is. But now I need Winona. She doesn't need me, make no mistake about that. In a profound way she is invulnerable.”

Bob was bent over. In that position he said: “We got … our man.” He breathed carefully several times, and gingerly straightened up. “Mainwaring. … He didn't make it. Gone too far before the cell therapy.”

It came to Reinhart that this was final. Splendor, his old friend, had died, for all the bold talk.

Sweet said: “But it works! If Hans had got to him a few weeks earlier, maybe only days, he would have brought him around. The large intestine, you see—”

“He was dying anyway,” said Reinhart. He looked at Bob. “You did no harm. You tried.”

Sweet was gaining energy. “No time to stand around and snivel, Carl. His head is packed with ice cubes from the refrigerator now, and they are rapidly melting. We need dry ice. I came back here to find Hans's supply has evaporated. Otto apparently let himself out of his cage and broke open the insulated crates.”

“He needed a hammer or crowbar for that,” Reinhart said wondrously. “Imagine, he can use tools!” He looked around for the animal.

“All the dealers are closed at this hour. I've been calling everywhere. The head is at present wrapped in a plastic laundry bag full of ice cubes.”

Reinhart did not want to think of poor Splendor, beyond hope. He was still searching for the remarkable Otto.

Bob struck his arm. “Carl, we need your aid. Unless that brain is frozen while it's still vital, we've lost. Hans has a portable iron heart going, to maintain blood circulation. But all that water ice can do is a slight cooling. The head must be packed in dry ice before we can bring the body over here. Those Black Assassins aren't helping any, either. They're holding Hans a virtual prisoner, a hostage, with the corpse.”

Reinhart saw Splendor as he had been twenty years before: healthy, handsome, quixotic. A man dies when he becomes effective. Then he saw helpless Bob Sweet, whose toupee had got off register in the fall to the floor.

“Look,” Reinhart said. “You know who'd have a whole truckful of dry ice? It's still early evening. There may still be some ice-cream vendors making their rounds. There's your answer: send the Assassins out to hijack a Mr. Softee truck.”

Bob thought for an instant. Then he said: “Carl, you have proved your worth to this organization.” He pointed to the wall telephone. “Would you mind? They might listen to you.”

“Splendor was my friend,” said Reinhart. “You know he never mentioned the pain, not once. It must have been indescribable. I never knew him as well as I should have.”

Bob's exigent finger stabbed the air. “Then get going,” he cried. “You can make up for it in the next century, when you are both thawed out.”

“But that,” said Reinhart, “may be more than a century from now. Meanwhile, we won't know if it works. Also, it supposes that I too will be successfully revived. But what if I live another forty-four years, am then frozen, and—”

“Carl, there are times when you can be petty.” Sweet changed color in exasperation. “This is a serious matter, and when did you ever know anything serious that was absolutely certain?”

Reinhart reflected on this interesting question while he dialed the number.

A Biography of Thomas Berger

Thomas Louis Berger (b. 1924) is an American novelist best known for his picaresque classic,
Little Big Man
(1964). His other works include
Arthur Rex
(1978),
Neighbors
(1980), and
The Feud
(1983), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Berger was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Thomas Charles, a public school business manager, and Mildred (née Bubbe) Berger. Berger grew up in the town of Lockland, Ohio, and one of his first jobs was working at a branch of the public library while in high school. After a brief period in college, Berger enlisted in the army in 1943 and served in Europe during World War II. His experiences with a medical unit in the American occupation zone of postwar Berlin inspired his first novel,
Crazy in Berlin
(1958). This novel introduced protagonist Carlo Reinhart, who would appear in several more novels.

In 1946, Berger reentered college at the University of Cincinnati, earning a bachelor's degree two years later. In 1948, he moved to New York City and was hired as librarian of the Rand School of Social Science. While enrolled in a writer's workshop at the nearby New School for Social Research, Berger met artist Jeanne Redpath; they married in 1950. He subsequently entered Columbia University as a graduate student in English literature, but left the program after a year and a half without taking a degree. He next worked at the
New York Times Index
; at
Popular Science Monthly
as an associate editor; and, for a decade, as a freelance copy editor for book publishers.

Following the success of
Rinehart in Love
(1962), Berger was named a Dial Fellow. In 1965, he received the Western Heritage Award and the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters for
Little Big Man
(1964), the success of which allowed him to write full time. In 1970,
Little Big Man
was made into an acclaimed film, directed by Arthur Penn and starring Dustin Hoffman and Faye Dunaway.

Following his job as
Esquire
's film critic from 1972 to 1973, Berger became a writer in residence at the University of Kansas in 1974. One year later, he became a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Southampton College, and went on to lecture at Yale University and the University of California, Davis.