Vitals Read online

  Perhaps Banning could translate the letter.

  But would I want him to? If he was holding something back from me, how could I trust him? And yet—if he had wanted to read the contents of the package, wouldn’t he have done so already?

  I set that conundrum aside for the moment and returned to where I had left off in the diary.

  Parasite persuasion and bacterial communications with gut cells, skin cells. G. goes to Beria, Beria goes to Koba. Beria was much more than just boss of the secret police. Koba would later put him in charge of nuclear weapons research. But this—this would end up bigger even than atom bombs. Beria told Koba that Golokhov could give them a pipeline right into the human psyche.

  G. makes his case. Koba gets it instantly; G. gets funding, assistants, and a full-blown factory-lab in Irkutsk. This much is clear. Ch. and T. tacitly concur that’s how it happened: The questions they won’t answer—how did G. survive Lysenko?—and the way they smile when I tell them my suppositions. They are hiding a lot but it’s with a peculiar Russian guilt and shame. They don’t want to hide anything, I’m thinking.

  I tried to remember Russian history. Beria had been executed after Stalin’s death. But what in hell did that have to do with our research? We were interested in life extension, not mind control.

  Ch. and T. decided to take me to a place outside Irkutsk. Shame or truth or something compels them.

  They drove me in a beat-up Opel truck fifty kilometers outside Irkutsk. Through a wire fence, past a pond, a forest of trees maybe sixty, seventy years old, a clay road flanked by torn-up asphalt and cobbles. Into a ghost city. Well-made stone and brick buildings, wooden houses, paved streets. All deserted, windows gaping.

  “This is City of Dog Mothers,” T. told me in his broken English. I’m sure I missed half of the story. Do I believe?

  Beria put this place together in ’38–39, as testing ground for Silk. G. involved—to what extent, T. and Ch. don’t know or won’t tell. Modern power and water, an internal phone exchange, even a post office, comfortable, but isolated from Irkutsk and all surrounding villages.

  Five thousand political prisoners were brought here—Jews, of course, military types and their families, intellectuals from Moscow and points as far west as Lithuania and Georgia. A fancy Gulag, I think, but T. and Ch. tell me not a Gulag, a research center. It never had a name just a number. 38-J.

  I don’t like this place. Nobody comes here, nobody lives here now. It doesn’t feel right. We walk through the streets and it’s still clean, but empty, not even cats or dogs or rats. T. and Ch. only allow me an hour or so to look around. They can’t stand any more. They seem to want to say more, but at first they can’t, they are ashamed in a way I have not seen in them before.

  I gather from what they do say that everybody brought here was encouraged to believe this was a model city. A chance to redeem themselves and live out the purges. Then, bit by bit, the stores were supplied with foodstuffs prepared by Silk. Beria and Koba wanted to know how much and how long it would take.

  Now T. finally opens up. He wasn’t even born then but he weeps.

  A few weeks after the special food arrived, the inhabitants of 38-J were walking naked in the streets, fornicating in public. Human meat—mostly children—was being sold in the butcher shops. Beria brought in truckloads of guns and gave them to every citizen. He showed off by walking unguarded through the streets in a town filled with armed dissidents and political prisoners who should have hated his guts.

  Squads took instructions by phone, or from planted neighbors, and hunted down people who visited the library, who were bald or bow-legged, who carried their babies in public. Some were told to go out and whistle and others were told to go out and shoot all of those who whistled.

  In 1940, Beria decided to shut it down, a big success and nearly everybody dead. The last women left alive in the town walked on all fours through the streets. A few who had been pregnant smiled and opened their blouses to nurse Beria’s guard dog puppies while photographers made movies.

  Koba laughed to see such fun.

  They insisted I return to the truck. They had had enough, and so had I.

  That evening, they gave me a video tape. The visual history of Silk.

  There was no videocassette. I stuffed the diary and papers back in the envelope, and the envelope into the valise. I don’t think I had ever read anything so ugly and disturbing. My head hurt. I had to get outside. I had to get some fresh air, no matter what the risk. But I didn’t move. I needed a signal, something I could use as an excuse. A fly buzzing through the window would do it. A car horn. Anything.

  An hour passed, two.

  I lay down on my bed, wondering what was wrong with me. Cowardice, indecision, a head full of cotton. I tried to read more, but the letters swam on Rob’s pages. Sleep would not come. The room got hotter and the air more still.

  Outside, traffic seemed to recede, car engines grow softer, voices more distant.

  The room phone rang, mechanical and shrill. I jumped, then turned to Banning. His snores continued. The phone rang again. I picked up the receiver.

  “Yes?”

  “This is Rob,” said the voice on the other end.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “Wrong again. How’s my lovely Prince Hal?” It sounded like Rob.

  “Quit fucking with me,” I said.

  “Listen close. You’re tired and it’s time to show me what you can do.” The voice began to read a long list of numbers.

  “Wait,” I begged. “I don’t know what you’re saying. Please slow down.”

  “Got that?” the voice asked. “Read me back the last three numbers.”

  I tried to remember but couldn’t. “I saw Lissa today,” I said.

  “Yeah? Listen again, and this time use your head. This is important.”

  Was it Rob? I was convinced for a moment that it was. I had never seen him with his brains leaking out; the stupid funeral director who turned down tips had seen him that way, not me. I had to take my twin’s death on faith, and that was certainly not enough.

  It was good to believe he was still with us, so I could apologize. “Are you nearby? Downstairs?” I asked. “Rob, I am so sorry—”

  “Please shut up.” The voice read me the list of numbers again. The air seemed thick as warm Jell-O. When I couldn’t or wouldn’t recite the last three numbers on the list, he swore under his breath and hung up.

  I had disappointed my twin once more. I felt devastated. I so much wanted to please somebody, do what somebody expected me to do.

  I lapsed into a low state of fugue. Remembered it was time for my tablets, to be taken with food. That would be all right. I opened another can, this time of kidney beans, swallowed my pills, and ate half of the contents. Then I leaned back in the chair and fell asleep.

  When I awoke, I was stiff all over and it was nine in the morning. Banning was shaking my shoulder. He held a white-and-silver blur in front of my face. “This isn’t our can opener,” he said, his brow furrowed. “I bought a cheap one. That one’s gone. Someone’s been in our room. Did you eat anything?”

  I stared at him stupidly, then reached to the nightstand. The valise and Rob’s papers were still there. “I ate a can of peaches and half a can of beans,” I said.

  “I did not buy a can of peaches,” Banning insisted. He backed off two paces, bumped up against the defunct air conditioner, and stood with a rigid, military bearing that might have been comical in another circumstance. “You might be tagged.”

  I said, “I’m fine. Bad dreams, though.”

  His look changed to puzzlement. “Did anybody call?”

  “No,” I said.

  “We have to find another place to stay.”

  “All right,” I said.

  Within half an hour, we had paid our bill and taken our belongings—pitifully few—down to Banning’s car.

  “What do you know about the City of the Dog Mothers?” I asked him as we drove through downtown.r />
  “Awful,” he said. “But not the worst.”

  23

  Lissa, Banning, and I sat before Monroe Callas’s desk at ten o’clock. We had stood for an hour outside the warehouse, saying little; our appointment had been for eight-thirty, and Callas had insisted we be there on time. The tension in the big room was thick, and it did not come from our being kept waiting.

  Callas leaned back in her chair. “My front door was spray-painted early this morning,” she announced, with an extra lilt in her voice that could have been mistaken for caffeine energy. “I live in a good neighborhood. Vandalism is rare, graffiti unheard of. There’s substantial security, three perimeters, two of my own design and under my control. Nobody who comes to this warehouse knows where I live.” She looked directly at Banning. “You have no idea where I live, do you?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Can you guess what was spray-painted on my door?” Callas asked.

  “No,” Banning said, brows lowered defensively.

  “’Jew Bitch Whore.’”

  Banning’s face hardened. “Why,” he began, pausing to gather his words, “would I do such an obvious and stupid thing?”

  Callas shrugged. “I’m not Jewish. I’ve never practiced the world’s oldest profession. As for being a bitch—you bet. No argument.”

  She let that sit for a while. I began to feel sorry for Banning.

  “I doubt very much it was Mr. Banning,” Callas finally said. “It was probably one of our gardeners. I’m late because I traced his muddy footprints from the front porch to a garbage bin in the rear. I won’t go into details, but he must have sprayed my door about 5:00 p.m. last night, just after he finished weeding the lawn. If I confront him . . . a gardener, a guy who hardly speaks English and who has no rational motive to do any such thing . . . What will I discover?”

  “Confusion,” Banning said.

  “That’s what I was afraid of.” Lines appeared beside her lips—lines pointing down. “Is my gardener being controlled by some top-secret Russian spy agency?”

  None of us answered. Ridiculous, paranoid, too much to admit.

  “Do they go door to door, ‘Avon calling’?” Callas reached into a desk drawer and pulled up a folder full of printouts and clippings. “A Mr. Hefner Thorgood was brought up on weapons charges yesterday for firing an unlicensed .45 in Berkeley city limits. The People’s Republic doesn’t like that. He shot two dogs he said were attacking a man. Sound familiar?”

  I nodded.

  “There’s no police record of the dogs’ owner filing a complaint, so I can’t trace her. But there is an earlier report of a man who claims a woman set her pooches on him, then called them off and moved on.”

  Banning nodded, as if what she was saying fit some pattern.

  “Did our pooch lady make a mistake? Run into someone about your size and age before she found you?” Callas asked. “Next we have a Mr. Alvarado Cunningham, transient. Mr. Cunningham is a drunk. He’s known to the police for urinating in public and tossing plastic bags full of his own excrement into the backyards of well-to-do citizens. A general nuisance. He’s accused of setting a fire in Berkeley on August 8. Mr. Banning, are we thinking that maybe somebody hypnotized him? Or is he a Russian agent in disguise?”

  Banning did not answer.

  “People just don’t do things out of the clear blue sky, for no reason,” Callas said softly. “Brainwashing isn’t easy. But here’s how I would work such a scheme. There’s historical precedent. I’d find vulnerable people in the neighborhood, near my targets, and I would set them up and work them. However they do it. Drugs, hypnosis. Phone calls in the night.”

  I clamped my teeth.

  Callas flipped through more copies. “Let’s check my hypothesis. Dr. Stanley Mauritz, accused of assault and murder in Washington state, is pleading not guilty by reason of insanity. His medical record, filed with the court by his attorney, includes treatment for bipolar disorder. And your submarine pilot, David Jackson Press . . . Treated in 1998 for depression. He became born-again shortly thereafter.”

  “Rob was never treated for anything,” Lissa said. “He had no mental disorders when I married him.”

  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 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 sick?”

  “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.”

  “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 mumblety-peg. 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.”

  24

  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 I 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 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.”