Vitals (18 page)

Callas looked at me for confirmation. "True?"

"We've never been diagnosed with any clinical mental conditions," I said.

"Rob wasn't harassing or threatening to kill anybody, was he?"

"No." Lissa shook her head. "Not that I know."

"Never," Banning said.

I agreed.

"He was mostly a victim, a target--as Mr. Banning claims to have been."

"I was mentally clear of disorders before 1992," Banning said, his voice thin.

"But since then ... paranoia, anti-Semitism, obsessive racist thoughts, total collapse of your academic and writing career because of inappropriate behavior and associations," Callas read from a list. "Or is all that just character assassination?"

Banning took an interest in his knees.

Callas shuffled all the papers on her desk into a neat stack. "I'd like

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Rudy and Lissa to step back into the office for a few minutes. I want to talk with Hal alone."

Lissa stood and walked away at once. Banning got up more slowly, glancing forlornly between us.

After they had left, Callas said, "People who kill people usually want something, or they don't want something. What are you doing that someone would kill for?"

"My research."

"Research on living longer." She smiled dubiously. "Are you competing with a major corporation to get a drug onto the market?"

"Not that I know of. No drugs."

"Have you stolen secrets from somebody? Truth is important here, Hal."

"No. Nobody rational would believe that, anyway."

"Have you seen anybody you think might have been associated with these efforts--anybody suspicious?"

I told her about the man with the spray bottle in the market in Berkeley.

"What would anyone spray on lettuce?" she asked.

"Bacteria," I said.

"To make you sic?"

"Not in the normal sense. To change behavior."

"I don't follow that, Hal."

"Neither do I."

"Do you have a gun?"

"No."

Callas mulled this over. "A permanent place of residence?"

"Not now."

"Gun laws being what they are, and with your name still circulating in the police system, it could take you several weeks to get a pistol and a concealed weapons permit. Maybe longer. Are you willing to buy a handgun illegally? It won't be cheap."

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"Do I need one?" I asked.

"Yes, you do,"

"How much?"

"A good nine millimeter, about seven hundred dollars, no questions asked. A reliable Saturday night special, maybe two, three hundred."

"What about Banning and Lissa?" I asked softly.

"Is anyone trying to kill them?" Callas countered.

"I don't know."

She shook her head. "My guess is, either Mr. Banning or Lissa Cousins, or both, could be a problem for you."

I couldn't absorb that right away.

"They're both untrained and vulnerable. Mr. Banning is a definite risk, and I'm always suspicious of female altruism, unless there's a romantic motive."

I shook my head.

Callas flattened her hand on the desk as if for a game of mumbletypeg. She stared down at it. "Lying could be fatal, Hal."

"There's nothing between us."

"What happened last night to make you abandon your hotel room?"

"Banning thinks someone broke in and planted a can opener and a can of peaches," I said. "I used the can opener and ate the peaches. He thinks I might have been tagged." I explained what that meant.

Callas regarded me with morbid curiosity. "Do you feel ill or out of-sorts?"

"No."

"Could you get the can opener analyzed?"

I thought that over. "Yes," I said.

"Why was your brother in New York?"

"I think he was putting together the last pieces of a puzzle," I said.

Callas looked away and shook her head. "You're claiming your enemies, whoever they are, work like the Shadow--they cloud men's minds. No?"

I felt like a bug under the tip of a huge and descending pushpin.

"Why couldn't they cloud your mind, too?"

I couldn't give that a comfortable answer.

"It's all up for grabs, isn't it?" Callas said. "Everything we know about sanity and free will." Her knuckles rapped the desktop lightly. She looked through the broad steel-frame windows. "I eat a lot of fresh produce. They know where I live. What happens if they decide to cloud my mind? What good am I to you then?" She let out her breath. "I'm returning Mrs. Cousins's check." She pushed Lissa's check across the desk. "The detective work is gratis. Think of it as an exchange for alerting me to some interesting facts. And for what it's worth, from a professional who doesn't feel very smart anymore, some advice. Get a gun. Forget everything you think you know about life and decency and civilization. Stay away from your friends.

"And stay the hell away from me"

I joined Banning and Lissa in the street outside the warehouse. "We're too weird for her," I told them. I handed Lissa the check. "She knows I don't trust Rudy, and Rudy doesn't trust me. And she thinks perhaps you shouldn't trust me, either."

Banning nodded as if that only made good sense. "I had a relationship with your brother," he said. "It takes me a long time to trust someone--I'm sure by now you can understand why."

Lissa looked at me sadly. "Whom should trust?" she asked.

"I think Mrs. Callas is right," I said. "We should all go our separate ways."

"I've performed my duty to your brother, to the extent I was

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able," Banning said. He sucked in his cheeks, making little hollows, before adding, "Now I hope to return to obscurity and failure. Best of luck."

We watched him walk down the street to his beat-up brown Plymouth, a diminishing figure in the perspective of the walls and windows of the warehouses.

"This is stupid," Lissa said. "Where will you go?"

"Wherever, I'll be on foot," I said. I started walking south. The engine of Banning's old Plymouth coughed. I smelled its blue smoke.

"Right!" Lissa shouted after me. "No money, no car--just your goddamned shoes! You are so incredibly stupid"."

I stopped. Lissa stood on the broken sidewalk, wrists corded, fists clenched, face tight and splotched with red. She was furious and frightened. My resolve, not the strongest to begin with, weakened.

I had been alone for so long I had forgotten how much I despised it. But Banning could go, and I would never for a moment miss him. Let's face it; I did not want to turn my back on Lissa. There's an instinct in most men that keeps us tied to beautiful women.

It's a real, honest-to-God weakness, and it's part of what makes us die younger.

"It cannot end here," she said. "I don't want it to end this way."

I swore under my breath and jogged past her to the Plymouth. It took a while for the car to warm up. Banning rolled the window down a crack and gave me a wary, sideways look.

"Nothing funny, now," he warned.

"Did you pack the can opener?" I asked. "May I take it?"

He drummed his fingers on the wheel for a second, then said, "It's in the box in the trunk. Just pull the wire poking out of the lock hole."

I rummaged through the box of canned goods and found the can opener, then slipped it into the valise beside Rob's papers. I shut the trunk, slamming it twice before it caught.

"Found it," I said. "Thanks."

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He rolled up the window and pressed down on the accelerator. The Plymouth chugged north and turned the corner.

Lissa drove us past the airport, heading south, it didn't seem to matter where. For twenty minutes it was enough to be in the car and going. If we started asking questions, the tough decision would be, where to begin? Pull on this thread, would it come out short and loose, or would it unravel the whole mystery? So far, every pulled thread had revealed nothing but fuzz.

"Someone pretending to be Rob called me last night," I said.

"Rob is definitely dead," she intoned, as if repeating a mantra. "They were messing with you."

"Who?"

"Whoever."

"That's why Banning was so glad to leave. He thinks I've been tagged."

"All right, being tagged, what does that mean?"

"Slipping bacteria or something in your food. Mind control."

"That's Banning's craziness. Banning drove Rob to think such things."

"Did he? Rob wrote about what he learned in Siberia, and it's pretty damned scary." I opened the valise and lifted the envelope. "There was a Russian program in the 1930s to develop bacterial brainwashing. Certain kinds of special bacteria, laced in your food, could change your behavior or make you suggestible. Someone could then run you. Control your mind. You'd be tagged."

"Do you think they control your mind now?"

"No."

"Why not? They--whoever they are--sound ever so powerful. They scared Mrs. Callas."

"I'm on antibiotics," I said. I'd been mulling that over for a couple

of hours. As a hypothesis, it was definitely interesting, but it didn't cover any number of details--my trancelike state the night before-and it didn't explain how I'd escaped the madness on board the Sea Messenger.

"Antibiotics? That's all it takes to escape from the grip of Dr. Mabuse?"

"Who?"

"Dr. Mabuse," Lissa said. Mah-boos-ah. "Fritz Lang made a movie about an evil criminal mastermind named Mabuse. Supposed to be a symbol for Adolf Hitler."

"Oh." Clearly, I had spent too much of my life buried in journals and lab manuals.

"Wouldn't these masters of the universe have thought about antibiotics?"

"There were very few antibiotics in the twenties and thirties. Just sulfa drugs."

"So Dr. Mabuse has this little trained flea circus of master spies, except they're bacteria," Lissa said. "And antibiotics knocks them for a loop-the-loop on their little trapeze. They shout "Mein Gott' and their eyes--do bacteria have eyes?--turn to little x's. How convenient."

I smiled. " "Bozhe moi, if they're Russian. We'll see, after another eight days," I said. "I'll run out of pills by then."

The conversation was so desperately loopy that it couldn't help but cut some ice. Lissa raised her arms and stretched as much as holding the wheel allowed, then yawned conspicuously, not tired, but to relieve stress.

"Rob gave the envelope to Banning, to give to you?" Lissa asked suspiciously.

"Yeah."

"You're sure it's Rob's?"

"I know his handwriting. You can read the papers if you want."

"You've decided to trust me?" Lissa asked, her expression somber. She kept her eyes on the road. The traffic was bunching up and getting

her ky-jerky, requiring her full attention. A red Honda with tiny tires carrying three young men in reversed ball caps zipped in front without signaling. She tapped the brakes and the horn at the same time.

"Trust doesn't amount to a hill of peanut shells," I said. "If what he wrote about happened, if I'm putting two and two together properly, if what Banning says makes any sense, or what AY said--"

"AY?" Lissa asked.

"Rob didn't tell you much about his work, did he?"

"Not at the end. I just couldn't stand watching him fall apart. What kind of antibiotic?" she asked.

"Integumycin. It's new."

"I'm surprised any antibiotics work now. So many resistant germs. It's like they have it in for us."

"Yeah," I said. "Where are we going?"

"Right now, it's eleven o'clock, we're stuck on the 101, and we're going nowhere," she said.

"I have Rob's keys," I said. "And I have a map." I slipped the map out of the envelope and unfolded it over my lap. A picture on ancient browned newsprint slipped from between the folds. It showed a line of smiling officials decked out in sashes, cutting a long ribbon with an outsize pair of scissors. Over their heads hung a banner:

SERVING AMERICA THE VERY BEST: THURINGIA

NUTS FRUITS PASTRIES

The caption read, "California's newest tourist town welcomes visitors."

On the map, two circles had been marked in red pen, one around a small dot with no name east of Livermore, the other around San Jose.

"Do you know anything about a place called Thuringia?"

"No," she said. "Sounds like a sausage."

"How much do you want to get involved?" I asked her.

She gripped the wheel tighter.

"Lissa?" I leaned forward to catch her eye and force her to answer.

"I want to feel at peace sometime in this life," she murmured. "If you're going to do what Rob did ..." She glanced at me, and I knew instinctively that she was seeing Rob. My brother and I had diverged little in appearance in almost three decades. Rob had been dextro, I am levo--right-handed and left. Adroit and gauche. His hair had curled deasil, my hair curls widdershins. He put on his shoes first right, then left--me, the reverse. His left eye had been tilted a little, my right eye is tilted a little. Different fingerprints, retinal patterns, of course; embryos have some autonomy when they develop.

But the very same genes. The very same.

We had speculated, during our first and last run at cooperative dating, that disastrous eighteenth summer, that it wasn't technically unfaithful for one twin to sleep with the girlfriend of another. No difference in the old evolutionary game. We had learned otherwise.

Now I was the only one.

"There's something in Thuringia, and there's an address in San Jose," I said. "Shall we go open some doors?"

"Why?" Lissa asked.

"I think my brother's having one last joke on me. He gave me just enough evidence to tweak my interest, and he wanted me to follow in his footsteps and solve a mystery. I'm thinking if I succeed, I'll know why he was killed, and maybe I'll be able to recover my life."

That didn't sound convincing even to me, but how could I explain a masculine game of chicken between a dead twin and a live one?

"Maybe he's warning you, stay away from these places."

"By sending a map and a set of keys?"

She gripped the wheel even tighter. "Hungry?" she asked.

"Famished."

"Tell me where we should eat, and what," she said with just a hint of tartness. "You're the expert."