Vitals Read online

  “You should never have come here,” he said. “Far too obvious.” His accent was hard to place—English with a touch of Eastern European, I guessed. He had an Ace bandage wrapped around his left hand, wrist to knuckles, held by a metal clip. He noticed my attention and tucked the hand firmly in his pocket. “Your brother might have mentioned me. I am K. Shall we leave—this?” He thrust out an elbow like a stubby bird’s wing. “Let’s find some obscure place to talk. We’ll toast your brother’s memory and try to get drunk.”

  20

  “Hard liquor is the ideal,” K explained, and made a sour face as we took a seat in a back booth at Pascal’s, a pub on College Avenue.

  The dark room, illuminated by small yellow parchment lamps and a tiny skylight in the center of the pressed-copper ceiling, smelled of hops and sawdust sprinkled over the brick floor. “Wine is acceptable,” he added. “Beer . . . not very reliable. Water, forbidden, unless we buy it sealed and pick our store at random. Can you guess why?”

  “Poison?” I ventured.

  Again the sour face, a comment on my naÏveté. “I saw AY in the auditorium,” he said, as if to change the subject. “Did he say anything to you?”

  “He’s dying,” I said, and gave a small shiver. “Something about having his strings pulled.”

  K made a snuffle of acid amusement. “Did he mention Silk?”

  “Silk?” Not silt, I thought.

  “Silk,” he affirmed.

  “No.”

  “Then he doesn’t know. They pull strings,” K said. “The true Illuminati. I’ve spent the last fifteen years tracking down its history. The damned Jews blocked me every step of the way.”

  I stared at him intently. Thought about just getting up and leaving the bar. One problem with libertarians, scientific elitists, and other rugged individualists is that a significant minority of them hold odd and sometimes pernicious views about races and religions other than their own. Think The Bell Curve and you’ll know the type.

  “Are you sure we have anything to discuss?”

  “Your brother believed we did,” K said, his expression hardening. “He recommended you talk to me, right?”

  “My brother led his own life, and I lead mine.”

  Our drinks arrived. I had ordered a Scotch, something I enjoyed but rarely indulged in. K slugged back his bourbon neat and opened a bottle of club soda, listening for the hiss of escaping gas, then swallowed that down immediately after.

  “Oh, don’t get me wrong,” K said, arching those dramatic dark brows in a way that suggested Errol Flynn. “The Jews, too, have their strings pulled.” His features seemed to melt, as if he were a chastened puppy. A drifting sadness filmed his eyes and his lips twisted, the words were difficult to control. “Forgive me,” he said. “It’s a nervous tic. You’ll get used to it. It’s dogged me for twenty years now. Ruined my whole, fucking, life.”

  Just as quickly, the arch, self-assured face returned. The transformation was startling. “We are going to do this in stages. Less cautious, sooner dead. You have no idea who I am?”

  “Just K,” I said. “Like in The Trial.”

  “Your brother told you nothing more?”

  “Nothing.”

  “How close are you to your goal, Dr. Cousins?”

  I examined his face for a moment, wondering whether or not to lie. “Pretty close,” I said. “A few years, maybe less.”

  “Rob was at Lake Baikal. He died in New York. Do you have any idea what that means?”

  “No,” I said.

  “There is a war,” K said. “Your brother found himself in the thick of it—targeted because of his research.”

  “Rob and I were—are—doing research in life extension. I know it’s controversial, but how in the hell does it plant us in a war?”

  “I am not a scientist, I’m an historian. Your brother told me to give you something. It was practically his last request . . . to me.” He lifted a package from under his jacket and laid it out on the table: a nine-by-twelve buff paper envelope, filled to bursting, wrapped in glossy cellophane packing tape. He pushed the envelope across the table. Scrawled across the front in Magic Marker, in Rob’s blocky style, was Prince Hal Only. Out of the jaws of defeat. For you, Brother. With true love and respect. Rob Cousins.

  The signature was definitely Rob’s, with jaunty loops, though more ragged than I remembered.

  “As you can see—”

  “Please,” I said. My throat tightened, and tears welled in my eyes. I wiped them hastily and took hold of the package.

  K watched me. “It is from your brother,” he said softly. “No contamination. His hands, to mine, to yours, and . . . as you can see—”

  “Please,” I said.

  “This is important, Dr. Cousins. He made sure the document would not be opened by anyone but you.”

  The envelope’s flap had been taped over with embedded hairs the same color as my own, quite a few of them, arranged in a crisscross. Hairs protected the seams, as well. Paranoid. Driven. The wrapping matched the mood of Rob’s last message.

  “Do I look at it, then give it back to you?” I asked.

  “It’s yours,” K said, and withdrew a handkerchief to blow his nose. “Do with it as you please. I suggest, however, that you don’t read it here.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Rob told me to look out for you. So be it. Things are getting rough. You must start training.”

  “Training for what?” I asked. Despite the envelope, I was poised to get up and walk out and leave the mysterious Mr. K to his clockwork aberrations. I will not let Rob’s delusions drag me down with him.

  “Survival,” K said. “Do you have any money?”

  I shook my head.

  “I know someone in the City who is very good. She seldom takes on students as an act of charity. I hope we can find the money to pay her.”

  “What sort of survival—wilderness, camouflage tents, eating grubs and lizards?”

  K smiled with a paternal tolerance that I found more irritating than his nervous bigotry. “She teaches people how to avoid extraordinary attempts on their lives. I’ll make the appointment. Do you eat fresh fruit and vegetables?”

  I looked up from the envelope. “Yes,” I said, hoping I wasn’t compromising some important secret.

  K gave me a sharp look. “Stop now,” he said. “Canned food only, and supplement it with vitamins in sealed containers. Shop at different stores, widely spaced, supermarkets preferred. Avoid strangers, or friends who behave strangely. In time, you will avoid all your friends. Friends and lovers are our greatest weakness.”

  I remembered the little man with the spray bottle. Surely if someone were poisoning the entire city, it would be in the news.

  “Why should I do what you tell me?” I asked.

  “Your brother worked hard to protect himself, and for a while, it seemed he was succeeding.” He pointed to the envelope. “What he did not know, killed him.” K sidled out of the booth.

  My Scotch was half full.

  “I’ll buy this round,” K said. “Talk is medicinal.” I noticed for the first time that he was wearing a smooth beige glove on his unbandaged hand. He pulled money from his wallet. “They can reach us through coins and currency, you know,” he murmured. “But cash is better than being tracked through credit transactions.”

  We walked out into the early evening. The air was sweet and mild in Berkeley, the sun filtered through a high layer of haze. I clutched Rob’s envelope in both hands. Despite myself, I glanced at the people around us—a shuffling old man in filthy brown coat and unlaced boots, a glazed young woman with peach-colored hair and white skin, two moneyed types in gray suits as alike as freshly curried thoroughbreds.

  “Wait,” I said, stopping at the corner. “My brother’s dead. What in hell did you do for him that was so great?”

  K’s eyes shifted. I thought he was avoiding my question. He stared east, into the hills. My nose twitched. I smelled smoke.
/>   “Where do you live, Dr. Cousins?” he asked.

  I turned. A fire burned high and bright a few blocks below the Claremont. Flames rose seventy or eighty feet in the still air and cast a glow on the hotel’s white façade like an early sunset.

  A lazy column of smoke swung west, white and greasy, like—I could not avoid the comparison—the plume over a deep-sea vent.

  “Nearby,” I said. “Over there.”

  “Let’s make sure,” K said. His face became ruddy with an unexpected enthusiasm, and for an instant his appearance, more than ever, was pure Errol Flynn. “It’s possible they’ve already tagged your neighbors.”

  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 roundels 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.

  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 café 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.

  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 fumbled 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.

  21

  SAN FRANCISCO

  “I believe you now,” K said as we rode across the Oakland bridge. I wore K’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.