Vitals Read online

  “I teach people how to avoid trouble,” she said. “They pay me money.”

  “Well, staying away from trouble is certainly what we need to learn,” Banning said with false cheer. “Some months ago I tried to convince a young man to see you—perhaps you remember, we missed an appointment? Rob Cousins?”

  Callas’s face was impassive.

  “He’s dead,” Banning said sadly. “This is his brother.”

  “Sorry for your loss,” Callas said to me. She looked down at the steel table and tapped her fingers against her bare crossed arms. “Gentlemen, I have work.”

  “I am sure that if he remains alive, Dr. Cousins could pay your fee . . . within a few months,” Banning said. I gave him a startled look.

  “Not interested,” Callas said. “Thought I’d tell you personally rather than blow you off on the phone. Besides, you didn’t leave a number. Time to go, gentlemen.”

  “What did you learn about us?” I asked. I thought she might enjoy a chance to show off a bit. Her eyes gleamed.

  “Mr. Banning is notorious,” she said. “And you’ve got yourself into more trouble than I want to deal with right now.” She smiled; she had seen through my ploy.

  We followed her out of the office, still clutching our bottles. Callas unlocked the door and leaned into it, making the wheels squeak again. She pointed. I went, my face hot.

  Banning stood his ground. I thought he was about to get himself karate-chopped and pitched out on his ear.

  “You will doubtless want to know—” Banning began.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, coming between them. “Mr. Banning was mistaken to bring us here.”

  “Right,” Callas said.

  Banning looked stricken. “I must—”

  “Pleased to have met you, Mrs. Callas,” I said, and pulled Ban-ning away.

  Footsteps echoed in the stairwell behind us. I let Banning go and swiveled and crouched.

  “Banning, is that you?” a female voice called, breathless in the heat. A young woman in a white summer dress climbed the final step and turned the corner. Beneath a broad yellow sun hat, she wore dark glasses.

  Callas gave a low, derisive snort. How loosy-goosy I had become. The woman was so unexpected, so out of place, I did not recognize her. She pulled off her glasses.

  “I heard you on the stairs,” Lissa said. “I’ll pay, if money’s the issue.” To me she said, “Rob would have wanted it that way. How much?”

  The women assessed each other. Callas seemed to like what she saw. “Under the circumstances, and considering the students, thirteen-five for a thorough assessment and a four-week training session.”

  “That seems reasonable,” Lissa said.

  To me, it sounded outrageous.

  With a long wave of her arm, Mrs. Callas beckoned us back into her loft.

  I took Banning aside as Callas brought out more bottled water and added sliced apples, crackers, and cheese. We stood in a side hallway leading to a partitioned, freestanding kitchen and two bathrooms. “Eat nothing on that tray,” he warned me in an undertone.

  “Do you know Lissa?” I asked.

  “I’ve met her.”

  “How did she know we were here?”

  Banning looked uninformed, like a schoolboy accused of lifting candy from a classmate’s desk.

  “You called her, didn’t you?”

  He just stared.

  I held up my hands in futility. My life was not my own. Owing anything to Lissa seemed worse than owing Banning. I still felt guilty for the thoughts she made me think. That sundress.

  “I’m frankly surprised she came,” Banning said. “Obviously, not for my sake. She doesn’t like me. And I haven’t attracted the attention of a woman since my mistress in Manchester left me ten years ago. A Jewish mistress, I might add.”

  “I don’t want Lissa paying for this!”

  “You should have made your objections known earlier. I’m sure Callas has her signing a binding contract even now.”

  I slapped the wall with my injured hand. They must have heard in the office.

  “Look,” Banning said. “I’d just as soon she go away, but we don’t have much choice. You’re as vulnerable as a fawn on a freeway. You need what Callas has.”

  “Why am I letting you lead me around like a . . .”

  “An aging bigot whose harpies are barely less formidable than your own?” Banning toshed, very British. He frowned as if tasting something bitter and rejoined Lissa and Callas.

  My hand throbbed. I squeezed my wrist hard, gritted my teeth, and walked into the office. It was empty. Banning’s footsteps echoed on the concrete floor in the open warehouse. I followed.

  A wall of tall steel-framed windows opened east over more warehouses and industrial buildings. Whiffs of air pushed through the open lower windows, but it was as hot under the corrugated steel roof as it had been in the stairwell.

  Lissa and Callas were seated at a spare old oak desk, heads bent over some papers. Sun baked the floor under the windows. I hated everything about this.

  Lissa excused herself and walked over to me in a way that made the sundress look completely inappropriate. There was deliberation and no nonsense in her step, and her eyes bore into mine.

  “What are you doing here, with Banning?” she whispered. Banning, about ten yards away, conspicuously stared through the windows. “Do you know how crazy he is?”

  “We met yesterday. He helped me.”

  “He’s a Holocaust denier. He’s lectured to hate groups in California and Oregon. Jesus, it was bad enough that Rob consorted with him—now, why you?” Her jaw clenched and her cheeks turned pale.

  “This isn’t the place,” I said, trying to be mild and reasonable. “Some unusual things have been happening. Banning—”

  “How do you know he isn’t responsible?”

  I felt like a particularly stupid mooncalf.

  “What do you know about Callas? Mrs. Callas?” Lissa asked.

  “Absolutely nothing.”

  “Banning just leads you around like a goat?”

  There was nothing I could say.

  Lissa pulled back. “I called friends in law enforcement. Callas is respected, but she’s an equal-opportunity type. She’s trained some really nasty customers. We’re going to have a long talk,” she promised.

  “Why are you helping?”

  “Your mother and I had a heart-to-heart after the funeral. Remember?”

  I remembered standing in the hall with a piss hard-on.

  “She told me Rob was smart, but you are smarter. Well, maybe I’m smarter than either of you. I want to know who killed Rob, and why. I owe my husband that much.” She returned my unspoken skepticism with a “spare me” grimace. “I’ve explained that if you agree to her training, I’ll pay. I think she wants to learn more about you and Rob. She already has the goods on Banning.”

  Callas waited while we arranged our chairs. She propped her feet up on the desktop and wrapped her hands behind her head. All she needed was a matchstick between her teeth.

  “I’m on your payroll now, thanks to Mrs. Cousins. But we’re in the early stages, and if I so choose, I’ll cut loose. Fill me in.”

  Lissa went first. She told what she knew about Rob’s troubles and murder. I listened, trying to match the facts in her story to the papers I had been reading that morning. Rob’s manuscripts had been filled with a sense of adventure and discovery, but paranoia might have been just around the corner.

  I followed, with my tale of ships, submarines, harassment, arson, and dog attacks.

  Callas took a deep breath and shook her head after I finished. “I like our assailants quantifiable, our threats palpable and enumerable,” she said. “I know a little about Mr. Banning. The lurid parts. I meet a lot of weirdoes in my business, and I treat them professionally. Even paranoids have enemies. But you were once a respected historian. What happened?”

  “I was discredited,” Banning said. “Or I discredited myself. Let’s leav
e it at that for now.”

  “I can’t,” Callas said, “not if I’m going to grasp what we’re up against.”

  Banning straightened in his chair and gripped the arms. “In 1991, I stumbled upon documents relating to a certain research program, top-secret at one time, dusty and almost forgotten by then. Russian file-keeping is notorious.”

  “Go on,” Callas said.

  “A campaign was begun to discredit me shortly after this discovery. And long before I met with Rob Cousins.”

  “What sort of campaign?”

  “I was subjected to mind-altering substances. My behavior changed.”

  “Yes.”

  “I lost all my money and my woman, and I was hounded out of academe. I became possessed.” Banning looked as battered and drained of life as an old mannequin.

  “By what?”

  He shrugged. “Let’s just say that this is my afterlife, and it’s hell. To all intents and purposes, I am a dead man.”

  Callas studied him like a zookeeper assessing a new animal. “Do you think you were targeted by the KGB? The SVR?” she asked.

  “They had no reason, after the Cold War.”

  “The Jews?”

  Banning twitched in the chair. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Do you know what you believe, Mr. Banning?” Callas asked.

  “What I believe isn’t important,” Banning said. “My head is filled with truths that are lies, and lies that are truths. I walk carefully and watch what I say.”

  “Not all the time,” Callas said.

  He swallowed and licked his lips, avoiding her gaze.

  Callas returned her attention to Lissa. “You’ve never been threatened?”

  “No. But I watched my husband deteriorate. It could have been something like what Mr. Banning describes.”

  “Mr. Banning worked with your husband?”

  “He had some insights my husband thought could be useful.”

  The interview continued for an hour. Callas asked us about our personal habits, whether we had ever had firearms, weapons, or martial-arts training, our political affiliations, fringe groups we might be associated with. She listened and took notes on a yellow legal pad. At the end of the hour, she flipped the pad over, and said, “I can’t make heads or tails out of this. What you’re describing combines mind control with pointless violence or threats of violence from complete strangers.” She shuddered. “I don’t see how I can train you to protect yourselves against that kind of effort, if it’s real. The woman with the Dobermans . . . chilling.

  “Before I decide whether to proceed, I want to do more research. It could take a day or two.” She rapped her pencil sharply on the desk. Our first interview was over.

  As we descended the stairs from Callas’s gymnasium, Lissa told Banning to bug off. Just those words. Banning shrugged and said he would meet me back at the hotel room.

  “What a Sad Sack,” she said when he had left. She walked me down several side streets and up an alley to a diner that served the industrial area. We sat in a back booth under a dusty and flyspecked window. A small bud vase decorated the table, but the carnation had long since given its all.

  The waiter, a muscular young man with sideburns shaved into a Sony ad, ogled Lissa and honored me with a congratulatory smirk. I ordered two iced teas, and the waiter departed. Lissa tapped her serrated knife on the scarred tabletop.

  “I am really angry,” she said. It was her turn to look vulnerable.

  “At whom?” I asked.

  “Rob. Myself. We screwed up, didn’t we?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You both pretended you weren’t close to each other.”

  “We weren’t.”

  She shook her head and tapped the knife hard. I could see the glassy core of Lissa’s direction now, and it made me uncomfortable.

  “You and Julia are divorced, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “Julia stopped being interested in me or what I was doing. She started being more interested in other men. I don’t share that way.”

  Lissa’s smile was a sad ghost. The way her face worked, I doubted she smiled often. Her kind of beauty almost precluded that emotion. “I haven’t been with another man since leaving Rob. Or since marrying him. I didn’t lie to your mother. I wanted to get back together with Rob, but it was impossible. He was acting crazier than Banning.”

  I remembered the phone call at Lindbergh Field. What a pair Rob and I were. What a lovely pair of failures, hoping to live forever, but unable even to enjoy our allotted moment in the sun.

  “I’ve been doing my own detective work. I checked up on Banning, and I checked up on Rob to see if he was involved in anything suspicious. Drugs, that sort of thing. My family’s pretty well-off, so I can afford it. When we were still together, Rob went to Lake Baikal. After he got back, he read a book by Banning. I found a copy of the book in our house.”

  “Rob mentioned an organization called Silk,” I said.

  “A clandestine organization, formed before the outbreak of the Second World War,” Lissa singsonged. “It’s in Banning’s book, self-published about ten years ago. Along with his belief that Winston Churchill forced Hitler to go to war against England, that the Nazi concentration camps were educational resorts, and the gas chambers were actually fashionable saunas.”

  A silence over the table. “Bastard,” she muttered. “My grandfather lost his entire family at Dachau.”

  “If you have any explanation that makes sense, I’d love to hear it,” I said. “What did Banning do for Rob?”

  “Banning was supposed to be a whiz at tracking down documents. Rob wanted corroboration. He didn’t trust Banning very far, and Rob and I were . . .” She was having a hard time speaking, the emotion of a few seconds before still working through her. She swallowed hard. “We’d separated. I didn’t want to give him up, but he had this other life, this crazy search. Banning was helping him, and I couldn’t go there.

  “The last time he talked to me, he said he was taking samples from his skin and his nose. From his feces. Listening to his intestines. He said he was tracking down messages from some sort of supermind. Complete babble.” Lissa looked up from the gouge she was making with the knife. “I hired a private detective to track you,” she said. “I would have found you whether Banning called or not.”

  “I’m flattered,” I said. That was true, but her words also made my stomach muscles tighten.

  “You are so much like Rob,” she said, but it wasn’t a criticism. Her eyes were more than windows. I put my hand on hers—to stop her from cutting the wood.

  Then she turned away, and it was like throwing a switch. “I’m a glutton for punishment,” she said. She released the knife with a clatter, reached into her purse, and draped six dollar bills on the table, covering the fresh scars. “Where are you two staying?”

  We left the diner, walked to Lissa’s Toyota, and she drove me to the Haight.

  I rode the tiny elevator to the hotel room.

  Banning had just finished taking a shower and stood in his slacks and a T-shirt. He acknowledged my return with a curt nod, then reclined on the bed, inching down like an old man fearing a fall. He closed his eyes as if darkness were a delicious luxury and almost immediately began snoring. The worry lines around his lips and forehead softened.

  Life was grinding him down to a nubbin, too.

  I sat by the window looking out on the air shaft, feeling a roiling burn of dread. Banning wasn’t telling us everything he knew, perhaps not even everything he had told Rob. Nor was I telling him everything. I didn’t trust him, and he didn’t trust me. We were at an impasse.

  Lissa was caught up in our suspicion and confusion. I felt sorry for her.

  The shaft outside the window darkened. Banning had become Sleeping Bigot, locked in eternal slumber. The air conditioner was on the blink; a sticky, hot breeze poured through the heat exchange. I turned the machine off, o
pened the window, and leaned out, staring up at the twilight sky, a vagrant curl of cloud, a contrail savaged by high winds.

  Banning had laid in some supplies, a bag filled with cans and bottled water in the bathroom. My throat was parched, and I needed some reward for the miseries of the day. I opened a can of peaches and drank down the nectar, started to suck my fingers to recover spilled juice, thought better of it, and washed my fingertips five times with soap, without wetting the bandage. Then I finished off the slices and sluiced my head with water from the tap. The dressing around my neck got damp, but that wasn’t a problem. It felt good as it cooled.

  Canned food and vitamin tablets. No way to live. I wanted desperately to get back to the laboratory, any laboratory, and perform work, however menial. That was my life, not this unending lunacy.

  My stomach couldn’t decide whether it liked the peaches. I could feel shadows gathering in the corners of the room. My hand and neck ached, and Banning’s irregular snores allowed neither thought nor rest.

  I tried to ignore the distractions. I carried the valise to the desk, unsure where to resume, pulled out the wobbly desk chair, and sat.

  Finally, my fingers opened the valise and worked through Rob’s stack. I found a small airmail envelope and pulled out five strips of blue paper. Columns of three-letter nonsense words—abbreviations for the twenty common amino acids that make up proteins—filled both sides of each sheet. I laid them out on the desk. They could have made up one or more peptide sequences, running left to right, top to bottom, or in some other fashion, if arranged properly. A puzzle or a code. I rearranged them, and read them several different ways after each arrangement, trying to find something I recognized. No luck. I slid them back into the small envelope.

  A letter in Russian, inked with a fountain pen, protruded halfway from one of the typed manuscripts. I tugged, and it fell out with an airmail envelope attached by paper clip. Inside the envelope was a Polaroid photo, yellow-brown and fuzzy. It showed my brother and me standing on a city street, perhaps somewhere in Europe, both of us smiling. Rob had evidently kept the photo as a keepsake—touching, but I could not remember where it had been taken.