Vitals (14 page)

We ran, then walked, then ran again, up the gentle slope around the campus, passing through alternating stretches of fine homes and streets with weedy lawns and houses in need of painting, not yet made over for the rich.

I was sick at heart--though nothing much of importance was in my apartment (I was certain now the smoke had to be from my apartment). I worried about the landlady and her artist friends, and about the houses nearby.

The actual scene still came as a shock. Fire trucks had surrounded my short, narrow street, and thick gray hoses lay across the tar patched old asphalt like snakes, fat with pressure. Firemen leaned into hoses and aimed nozzles. Arcs of white water danced back and forth over the flames.

I stood in sick horror. Three homes were ablaze, the half-timber with my garage apartment and one on each side. The smoke was mostly steam now, the houses collapsing shells. Banana trees within the old greenhouse had become charred sticks, and the iron frame had twisted in an agony of heat. Beyond junipers still burning like flambeaux, I could see the black skeleton of the garage's upper floor. It fell in with a rush of heat and round els of flame that drove back a line of firemen.

A news helicopter churned the air with cocky whup-whups. Its downdraft pushed some of the smoke toward the street in a wicked, enveloping gray spiral.

"Yours, I assume." K gripped my shoulder.

"Mine," I said.

"Pity. I was hoping you'd put me up tonight." His tone was philosophical. "It's a long, old war, Dr. Cousins. I'm sorry." "Maybe it was an accident," I said, folding my arms in what I hoped looked like cool resignation. I sat on a concrete car barricade and let out my breath in a long sigh. Before K could argue, my landlady and her two short-haired friends found us.

"Thank God, Mr. Vincent, you're here!" the old woman exclaimed. Tears cut wet trails down her soot-smeared pink cheeks. "We all made it out. I'm so relieved." She touched her hair with a nervous, smoky hand. "Did you see anyone?" she asked. "Anyone suspicious? It happened so fast, the firemen say it must have been set. But why, oh, why here?"

She gazed up with dreaming blue eyes at the tall dogleg of white smoke.

"No accident," K whispered in my ear. "Let's go. You're known, Mr. Vincent. She might have set the fire."

I pulled away and stared at him in disbelief, then at my landlady. "I have to fill out an accident report--don't I?"

"Do it from a pay phone," K suggested with cavernous patience, as if explaining a simple game to an idiot.

I followed him like a robot through lines of gawping neighbors. The crowd thinned.

Just another day in Berkeley.

I felt light-headed from delayed shock.

A block and a half from the ash and smoke, I looked up at a rapid ticking, what I guessed was the spinning chain of a bicycle sneaking up behind us. K yanked me aside just as a big black-and-tan dog with a snoutful of busy teeth drew a long rip down the rear of my pants.

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No bicycle dog claws: two Dobermans on extensible leashes, held by a young, black-haired, black-clad Diana, her face a mottled peach pit of fury.

"Goddamn you!" she shrieked. "Goddamn you rotten son of a bitch! Chew him up, Reno, Queenie!"

The dogs choked against their collars. K ran off a good distance, but to give him credit, whistled and stomped to divide their attention. I ran backwards, hands up in a gesture of both supplication and defense, using my brother's package as a shield.

The woman glared. Her lips were flecked with foam. I could not believe what I was seeing and hearing.

"You destroy our neighborhood, you stalk our children and drive your huge car over our lawn, you leer at us in the supermarkets, and you sneak into our bedrooms!" The words caught in her throat.

The Dobermans danced in a white-eyed ecstasy of rage. Their hind legs wheeled and pumped like pistons, tendons taut as stretched wire. Front paws churned the air and knocked Rob's package to the ground. Nails swiped my palms, leaving blunt, bloody scrapes. The twin blurred arcs of their teeth snapped less than two feet from my throat. I could smell hot gamy whiffs of Alpo. They heaved and wheezed, hanging laterally from the white-nylon cords. The whites of their bugged eyes turned red as the veins in their necks were squeezed.

The Doberman on my right lunged and fanged the ball of my thumb. It lunged again and bit hard. I screamed even before the pain hit. The dogs' mistress chirped and crowed at the blood and gave her beasts more slack. The leftmost dog locked its paws into the hollows of my shoulders, twisted its head sideways, butting and poking through my weaving hands, then thrust its jaws home. As I went down, I felt its bloody cool nose on my Adam's apple, a wet flick of lips, the next ivory puncture, and another bright point of pain.

A hoarse, deep, "Call off the goddamn dogs, lady!" followed by

Two shots like thunderclaps

And

I fell over a planter, slid along a bent sapling, tripped on a rope staked to the dirt. Some part of my attention saw the two dogs haul right and drop as if slammed by two big hammers. Blood sprayed the asphalt.

I finished my tumble and lay on my back, hands pressed to my shirt, sobbing in shock and to get back my wind. K moved in on short quick legs. He snatched up Rob's package and glared at the huntress with cold irritation. His eyes went dark.

The shooter ran down the steps from a shake-shingled house not ten yards away, a black .45 in one hand, the other bracing, ready to squeeze off a third shot. He wore red shorts and a white T-shirt that had tugged loose on his middle-aged paunch. His arms and legs were thick and hairy and his fat hands looked soft and pink. He stared at the dogs with a wrinkled brow and made sad noises. "Ah, Jesus. I'm sorry."

The slugs from the .45 had struck the streamlined chests square, just behind their front shoulders. Good swift kills.

The woman's small breasts rose and fell under her thick black turtleneck. Skinny and ghostly, she belonged in a cafe filled with poets and cigarette smoke, not out siccing her dogs on strangers. She drew herself up with a toss of her short black hair and flung aside the leash reels. They raced over the asphalt, reclaiming their cords, tangled and spinning, until they clattered to a stop about a yard from where the Dobermans lay in parallel on the bloody sidewalk.

"Ah, Jesus," the shooter repeated, and knelt by the dogs. I felt my stomach clench and bile rise in my throat, tainted by the Scotch I had drunk in the bar.

"We have no further business here, none at all," K assured me. He helped me to my feet. "They'll come to their senses in a bit, and there'll be more hell to pay."

The huntress started to cry. Her cry inflated to a wail, then a shriek.

< I /

Only then did I notice a stench in the air. I thought it might have been the dogs. But I remembered Dave Press in the plastic sphere at the bottom of the sea.

It was the skinny woman in the turtleneck. She stank like a rotting jungle.

K tucked Rob's envelope back into his jacket, then wrapped my hand in his handkerchief, tying a deft knot around my wrist.

We ran.

To this day, I am surprised nobody followed. The woman became the center of attention. She laid into the man who had probably saved my life, beating at him with bony fists.

K jogged me, then walked me, and finally half carried me to an old brown Plymouth. I got in, feeling very woozy, and he drove me to the Alta Bates Hospital. As we pushed through the glass doors into the emergency room, I was white with shock and barely able to stand.

The receptionist performed her necessary rites of triage and asked about insurance.

"How long have you lived here?" K asked me as I rumbled for my wallet.

"I'm not badly hurt," I insisted, then felt the blood on my neck.

"Don't touch that," the receptionist said, grimacing as she wrote.

"How long have you been here?" K repeated.

"Just a few minutes. No insurance."

"Not the hospital," K said. "In Berkeley." He thrust a wad of bills on the counter, well over a thousand dollars. "Is that enough? Get my friend to a doctor."

K was full of surprises.

"Two months," I said. Another nurse pushed me through a light but judgmental crowd of sniffles and bruises and sprained ankles. My shirt was soaked with blood. Someone was pushing a wheelchair in my direction.

Just after I noticed how much blood, I got down on my knees,

(

grabbed the arm of the chair, and toppled over in the hallway and felt the cold gritty press of linoleum on my cheek.

I worry about germs. I hate hospitals and their germs.

"I believe you now," K said as we rode across the Oakland bridge. I wore It's threadbare suit coat over a green scrub shirt given to me at Alta Bates. My hand had been punctured in several places, but nothing had been torn, and there was no bone or nerve damage. My throat had been nipped, not ripped. I was lucky.

Rob's envelope pressed against my side. I leaned my head against the car window, queasy from pain--the Demerol was fading--and from my first intravenous dose of Integumycin.

"Thank you," I said. "But why should that matter?"

"You haven't been tagged," he said. "Or if you have, it hasn't taken."

"I don't know what that means."

"The woman with the dogs, and whoever set the fire, they were tagged."

"Tag, you're it," I said.

K gave this crack more than it deserved, a smirk and a wan smile. "Nothing funny about it. If you were tagged, you could be a grave danger to yourself, to me, and perhaps to others,"

"All right," I conceded. "What is it, a psychotropic chemical? They spray the fruits and vegetables and the whole neighborhood goes crazy?"

Saying that took most of my energy, and I felt faint.

"As I said, I'm not a biologist. Your brother was beginning to under!

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stand when they tagged him. He fought back as best he could." K stared grimly across the aisle of the half-empty bus. "He offered me an explanation for my difficulties. He said I must have been tagged ten years ago. And now I'm very small potatoes. It's a truly paranoid vision."

"Silk?" I asked.

He nodded.

"Sounds sinister," I said. "Like being strangled with a scarf."

"We'll find a room in San Francisco, cheap and anonymous. I'm practiced at lying low. We have enough cash for the time being. I'm relieved, actually. From this point on, at least we know." '

K seemed familiar with all the fleabag hotels in San Francisco. We ended up in the Haight in a narrow little building called the Algonquin, squeezed between an Asian grocery and a store that specialized in posters, bongs, and Betty Boop dolls.

The hotel had ten rooms, a tiny lobby, and a small couch sagging and fading in front of a fly specked window on the street. K rented a double with the air of an experienced, upper-crust European traveler, temporarily down on his luck while awaiting a draft from his London bank.

He paid cash.

The room was small, with two single beds, a dresser, a tiny closet,

and an adjoining bathroom. The sink in the bathroom was chipped. I was too exhausted to care.

I took off the ugly green shirt, lay back on the bed, and thought about withdrawing my remaining three hundred dollars from the bank. Repaying K for my hospital tab.

Phoning my mother and asking for a loan.

K pulled the chair over to the window. He rubbed his temples with his hands, as if trying to focus psychic energy on the brick wall across the narrow shaft.

"Churchill forced him to do it," he muttered. "That isn't where it began, but it led to where we are now." I slipped in and out of his ramble.

"It was the Jews," he continued. "Krupp was a secret Jew, did you know that? . A Jew. They wanted the whole world to go to war. Read my last book if you disagree. Thoroughly annotated. We have lived a century of shams and deceptions."

"I'm really tired," I moaned, and curled up on the bed.

K turned his face toward me. Tears ran down his cheeks. "I was the best there was at winnowing out the dark underside of contemporary history," he said. "The very, very best. I still am."

"Then why are you so full of shit?" I asked, uncharitably, considering what he had done for me in the past few hours.

"Am I?" he asked with deep sadness. He pointed to his temple with a long, knobby finger. "I've spent most of my life trying to understand the twentieth century. A hundred years of hobnail boots grinding human faces into hamburger. I've uncovered the darkest documents, the most heinous official papers ever concocted by human beings. It was my duty to read them, absorb motivations, plumb psychologies, to understand how such things could be. I imagined myself a doctor diagnosing a long and hideous disease. Perhaps my mistake was having an open mind. Ghosts got in. Bad and unhappy spirits."

I rolled over and stared at him.

"Why did my brother ever come to you?" I asked.

He wiped sweat from his forehead. "I wish I were a Jew myself. Then I would have the final answers. I would be given access ... if I knew the secret signs, the genetic identification. They wave a special... box ... over your head, and it sways left and right if you carry the blood of Aaron, front to back if you're of the Levites. Then they tell you--"

I had had enough. I swung my legs over the side of the bed, sat up with an effort, feeling my bandaged neck bind and my hand throb, and fumbled for the shirt.

"Don't leave," K said, a hitch in his voice. "Please. I surely do miss your brother. He could see me as I really am."

"What's your real name?" I demanded.

"Banning. Rudy Banning. My mother's maiden name was Katkowicz. She was Polish. I am Canadian by birth and British by nationality. I have written twenty-three books on the history of Germany and Eastern Europe, and for twelve years I was a respected professor at Harvard."

He pulled himself together and stood, then went to his coat and drew forth a wrinkled pack of cigarettes. He tapped out a cigarette and stuck it in his mouth, patted all his pockets, but could not find matches. The cigarette dangled, its tip bobbing as he spoke. "I was researching a Soviet program for the creation of artificial silk, in the 1930s. I located important documents. To make a very long story short, I came too close to the flame. They burned my wings."