by Robert Roper
She nodded slowly.
“He has a fellowship in the area. He’s taken leave from a sub-ministerial post in Mato Grosso state, Brazil, to do some more computerish thing. He’s from down there, his mother’s Brazilian and his father’s Argentine. Went into public health and worked under a man I know, d’Iulio, to start out. AIDS was the thing when Heitor came up, but d’Iulio put him onto dengue fever, which is an almost eradicated disease down there. He decided he wanted to work on better problems. He came to work with me.”
Interesting, but not exactly riveting, was what Melody seemed to be feeling. She crossed her athletic legs.
“Those shoes. You’re wearing those shoes.”
“You like them?”
“On you, very much.”
“Go on, I’m listening.”
“So, Heitor knew Samantha. Where Samantha was brash, world-conquering, he was self-effacing, bright but not wanting people to notice too much. Because he didn’t want them to feel bad. I was surprised he took a governmental post, a political post. He was more private than that. Maybe it was because of some ongoing struggle with his father, proving himself. Lula, the president of Brazil now, is said to have brought him along. Lula is a smart, competent fellow, does not surround himself with corrupt cronies, or not only with cronies. I’m guessing that Heitor’s mother had something to do with it, because she’s from an important family, and they probably know people in the government.”
Melody looked displeased. Landau asked her what was wrong.
“You know so many important people. I’m just a humble physical therapist. Why would you want to spend time with me?”
“I should think that’s perfectly obvious.”
“Come on, give me one good reason.”
“I find you absolutely wonderful. I don’t think of you as humble, the opposite, beautifully self-possessed. Not that anything’s wrong with humble. As for knowing big people, I do know some big shots, because I’ve been on projects that billionaires and politicians take an interest in, but that doesn’t mean I’m a big shot myself. Even in pissant Berkeley I’m not of the in-crowd, I’m not clubbable, I don’t give off the right smell. I’m the guy at the dinner party who spills wine on his own shirt. Ask your husband, Arthur. He knows.”
Melody seemed unmollified.
“I know, it’s hateful to talk about high important people. I’m just trying to explain Heitor to you. Heitor has run a major institution already in his thirties. He’s been near the center of power in a big country. The central state hospital in Cuiabá, if I’m not mistaken, was something he was responsible for. I’m thinking he burnt out and needed a rest, so he applied for a grant. He’s a numbers person, a math-head. One of my most promising.”
Landau was sitting on the edge of his bed. Melody now joined him, not getting too close, however.
“I don’t think a person like you just described is the one,” she said judiciously.
“No. But in the movies, that’s what makes him interesting. I checked him on the South American sex-crime databases. I wanted to know if there’s been a kill-spree down there, and it turns out there has. In the city of Cuiabá seventy-two young women dead in three years in the early nineties. That’s before Heitor got there, of course. Mostly young prostitutes.”
“Where is that, Cue-ee-abah?”
“Mato Grosso state. A city of about a half a million.”
“Seventy-two seems like a lot, no?”
“Yes, it is. It’s an outbreak.”
All in a rush, Landau and Melody were in a hot embrace, stretched out on the large, engulfing bed. Landau had been thinking about her to an absurd degree lately. He was becoming besotted. And these kisses that they were sharing now: they were real kisses, kisses as they were meant to be. Thank God we humans can kiss, he thought—think of the state of things if we could not.
“I have to go to the bathroom for a sec,” she said.
“Okay, hurry.”
Landau rolled onto his back. He smiled at his half-timbered ceiling. Odd that this was happening now, in the shadow of the dead girls. Were the two developments somehow connected? Did such things happen often to people accused of dastardly crimes, was it a well-known phenomenon, the desperate-love-in-the-shadow-of-the-gallows effect? It was queer, the conjunction, definitely most inappropriate.
Had he met Melody a few months ago, he might have overlooked her entirely. I was awash in self-pity, he thought, grumping my way through life. Grumping about what? Oh, the usual complaints of the overly fortunate, that I wasn’t rich and important enough, that the game was over and it hadn’t turned out as I wanted. Jad said it well: You gave up on your own career, Dad. But it didn’t feel as if I had. I simply ran out of steam, woke up one day and didn’t want to work anymore. Didn’t have to.
I still don’t want to work, not really. I only want to kiss Melody’s carmined lips. Find the murderer, too. Meanwhile, get out one more paper, perhaps, something on the theory side. And while I’m at it, why not cure cancer. Shouldn’t be too difficult.
“This is so fun,” she said, returning and immediately lying down beside him. “Kiss me, please. I’m ready.”
* * *
He called Walter Winckelmann to talk about old times, but Winckelmann didn’t answer, so Landau took the bus downtown on a blue-tinted chilly day, followed by a Berkeley police car. Winckelmann was in his late seventies now. Could often be found at his office in the grim Health Sciences building, pottering about. Had been emeritus for years, with no diminution of the desire to work. Still wrote a few dutiful papers a year. Was not a soft-money prof, like Landau, no, he had a regular appointment, with more institutional responsibilities. Had mentored an unconscionable number of accomplished epidemes, had built a whole empire, scattered over the globe. Nice man and something of a wise old dog.
The seven-story Health structure on Oxford Street looked like a stackable plastic box. The façade was a grid of giant Xs, suggesting cancellation. Why did people build ugly buildings, did they not recognize them as such? Any child could have told you that this one was a botch.
“Walter? Got a minute?”
The door was open to the famously disordered office.
“Oh, wow. Jesus, come in, Anthony. Anthony Landau, my God.”
Quite stooped over now. More pallid, hair very thin. Still had the same broad bony shoulders that Landau remembered, the same raptor eyes—would probably live another thirty years, working right up to the end, riding to work each day on a young bicycle.
“You know, I was thinking of you just the other day. Not in connection with all this nonsense,” Winckelmann said, “but about you and Samantha and that artemisinin affair, what was it called, the project in the eighties. ‘Roll Back Malaria Now.’ Roll back something, I can’t quite remember exactly.”
“It was Fight Back, I think, not Roll Back.”
“Right, Fight Back Against Malaria. The big FBAM campaign.”
“Ah, those palmy old FBAM days.”
Winckelmann reached toward a listing pile of printed sheets. With gentle tugs he extracted a paper about a third of the way down.
“Page seven, third paragraph from the bottom.”
“How do you remember such stuff, Wally?”
“I don’t. Someone mentioned it recently, so I hunted it down.”
Landau read the paragraph that Winckelmann had wanted him to look at. “Who are these people,” he asked, “writing this wretched scientistic English? They should be punished.”
“No, that’s an important paragraph, Anthony. That’s an extraordinary projection, and it has come to pass, like a veritable prophecy.”
“I don’t know about that.”
The paragraph discussed chloroquine, a drug that had been highly effective against malaria for twenty years. Eventually, strains resistant to it had developed, rendering it useless. A new fa
mily of drugs, the artemisinins, had been developed by Chinese scientists, but the artemisinins would themselves become useless in exactly twenty-four years, Landau and Beevors et al. had confidently projected, citing the usual factors promoting drug resistance, monotherapies, village self-medicators, poorly run inoculation schemes.
“It’s a sort of Moore’s Law in reverse,” said Winckelmann.
Landau did not quite get the connection to Moore’s Law.
“Call it Landau’s Law, then. Landau’s Postulate.”
“It’s not lawful in any proper sense, Wally, it was just a lucky guess.”
“No, you showed your calculations. You arrived at it in a rigorous way. See the footnotes.”
“Samantha wanted them in there, the figurings. She always liked footnotes.”
It was the big new world-health worry: emerging resistance to the best combined therapies. Patients taking three to five days to clear their blood of parasites instead of the usual two. By mathematically precise steps you could arrive at millions more deaths in Africa and other hard-pressed places on the basis of one or two resistant villagers in, say, Myanmar, or backwoods Cambodia.
“Bad news,” Landau said. “Terrible news. Why am I never right about the good things?”
“It’s good to be right in any connection.”
“Not sure about that.”
“You noticed something, Anthony. Conceptualized it. You and Samantha.”
“What’s going on in Southeast Asia that it happens there, not in Africa?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Harder times? Faster-collapsing economies? People go out into the forest when they’re about to starve, to gather wild fruit, and they get fevers when they sleep outdoors. They give themselves counterfeit drugs and resistance appears. I’ve never been to Cambodia myself. I hear it’s very primitive, but maybe its being less primitive than Africa is what condemns it.”
“I was there in ’04, on some brothel-hopping duty.”
“Right, good for you.”
“Wally, tell me something about Heitor, please. His government career has ended, apparently. Why?”
“Oh, I don’t think it’s ended. They want him back if he’ll come. But he’s a researcher at heart. He was bored and unhappy as an administrator.”
“Why did he come here, of all places?”
“To work on your lucky guess? Estimate viral dynamic parameters? Something like that I think.”
“That’s just silly.”
“Is it?”
“But why here, why not stay home in Brazil? He’s got everything online.”
“Have you ever been to Brazil? Not Rio but burnt-over rainforest Brazil, or a far-and-gone city like what’s-it-called?”
“No.”
“I was in Roraima for a year once. They hardly have towns out there, only crossroads with stores. Gold and bauxite mining. Yanomami Indians, Macuxis, lots of tribes. It’s like the 1870s but with Internet mapping.”
They talked on, Landau gathering that Winckelmann had no idea why Heitor had come to the U.S. A change of scenery: that seemed to be it.
“How’s Maxine, by the way?”
“Oh, she’s fine. She’s been gardening a lot. Mothering Heitor when he’ll let her. But you should come by, Anthony, she’d love to see you, she often asks about you. Come by for drinks.”
“Yes, I will, please give her my best. ”
Maxine Winckelmann: a laconic woman, verging on the hard-bitten. A retired econometrist trained at MIT. Professor at Wisconsin, Berkeley more recently. They were a childless pair, the Winckelmanns, by general consensus completely sexless, platonic partners of convenience; Maxine carried on with other men occasionally, one partner of hers having been Richard Flense of the History Department, who fancied himself a bit of a player. Wally himself favored graduate students from the tropics, dark males. In the nineties his office had been full of slender Sri Lankans with beautiful hands.
Landau had another bit of sleuthing to do this day. He took BART to El Cerrito, hopped in a cab, rode for half an hour east, at the cost of fifty-two dollars, then got on another random train. Took it for six stops. Rode the wrong way for three more stops, then switched trains and rode the right way to the end of the line, in the town of Martinez.
He had been to Martinez only once before, in all his years in Northern California. A Berkeley person simply does not go to Martinez: the cultural gulf is too wide. Small town on an arm of the bay, oil refineries, gun-owners, bayside foliage. Right there was a major affront to Berkeley sensibilities, because you could see the refinery gantries through the low trees, and Berkeley, though it had factories, did not do so crude a thing as refine petroleum—no, it worked on solar technology, more like, on high-end kitchenware.
As he entered the downtown Landau felt the impossibility of his position. He had emailed Samantha’s husband, Bill Beevors, hoping to extract information. Bill had been forthcoming—he was a sweetheart, Bill, and he had told Landau all that he knew.
Yes, there was a child, a single female child. (Samantha had had a child! Unbelievable!) Landau found himself walking along quiet residential streets in modest weekday Martinez, trying to look inconspicuous, not like a pedophile, nothing like that. It was the hour when schoolchildren get out of school, when mothers hurry to pick them up, and he was most concerned to look indifferently purposed, entirely harmless.
A school van passed, full of small offspring sitting mutely at the windows. Six- and seven-year-olds. He rounded a corner, and there was the yellow van, disgorging its Juanas and Latoyas and Craig Jr.s, as he imagined they were called. Nice-looking kids. He wanted to see a child of about eleven, though, not six or seven. Walked through the picking-up throng, smiling upon everyone. Overcast day, a few drops just beginning to fall.
Martinez had an absence of tall trees. Maybe they did not grow well near the bay, or maybe only intellectual compounds like Berkeley planted gigantic trees that reached to the empyrean, as the minds of its scholars were said to do. Different cars here, no gay Priuses, old pickups and dusty clunkers instead. Humble buzz-bomb Civics, announcing their unmuffled selves two blocks away. Here was the house he wanted, the number he’d been told. He walked on past, did not allow himself even to peek, even so he registered the low wood structure, askew picket fence, scruff of lawn. No flowers or trimmed hedges, nothing pretty growing, nothing. How do you not grow flowers of some kind in California, where everything grows, even in sullen February? It was odd.
An hour later. From the end of the same block, he saw a ten-year-old sedan pull up at the house, and a girl get out and run inside, bearing an overloaded book bag. Skinny, long-legged, eyeglasses. Ringlety black hair. Putting on the most anodyne of expressions, Landau surged forward. At about thirty yards the driver’s door of the sedan opened and a small woman, possibly of Asian extraction, emerged bearing grocery bags and a purse and a coat, something not quite right about her, a limp, a one-leg-shorter type limp. Japanese, maybe, and at twenty yards the schoolgirl burst back out of the house, without her book bag now, and ran to help the woman, imploring her not to haul those heavy packages. Half a head taller than the Asian person, pale skin, Landau-ish nose, noble nose. Oh, you just know these things, you register them in your heart. In the way she coddled the woman, who was no doubt her mother, taking things gently out of her arms, the woman beaming meanwhile, Landau thought he could read deep fondness between them, deep daughter-mother communion.
Walked on by. Did not allow himself a single look back. All right, just one, a look when they were at the door already, the mother just entering, the daughter holding the door open with a childish knee. Then she was gone, too. Landau walked on. Fought an urge to turn back, to knock at the door, to say something. It was raining steadily now, though lightly. His hair was soaked, so perhaps it had been raining for a while and he hadn’t noticed. He walked on.
chapter 17
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nbsp; Sometimes the worst things happen. On the train ride home he was in conversation with himself, then with Samantha, then he reached a point of tenuous calm, an eye-of-the-hurricane place, because, what could you do? What in the world could you do? He needed to speak to Deena about this. Deena more than anyone, because Deena had no kids and had thought through the meaning of being with child as well as without, but he had left his cell phone at home, to foil pursuers, so could not call her. In case what he knew about cell phones from TV shows was true.
Melody was childless, as well. Or, maybe not. Crazy that he didn’t know that about her. Arthur Fromm had a daughter, he knew that, he had heard her spoken of. Maybe the daughter was from an earlier marriage. Maybe Melody and the kid didn’t get along.
His BART car was empty, and the elevated views of Concord and Pleasant Hill in the small rain lent his arguments with Samantha a certain tristesse, but it was good news, wasn’t it, intriguing, compelling news? What one could surmise from the shape of a nose seen for about a second? Between Walnut Creek and Lafayette he was alone in the car, then an elderly Japanese man got on, who by virtue of appearing at this moment seemed a symbol—he wore an Oakland A’s cap, like the unfound Mexican, he was Asian, as the diminutive limping mother was, and there was something grandfatherly about him, which caused Landau to reflect that he, too, was now a grandfather, or a second-time father. Good God! How was he supposed to feel about that, was there any feeling appropriate to such a case? He did not feel bad, only uncertain as to the way forward. Must talk to Deena, Deena will have some ideas.
“Deena, please call me back. Urgent matter.”
As he was drying off after his shower she called. “Anthony? How are you?”
“Oh, fine. I’m putting on my robe now and walking downstairs. Going to go pour myself a stiff drink.”
“Okay.”
She walked downstairs with him. “Slivovitz, I think,” he said. “Jewish firewater. You gave me the bottle, you and Harold. For Hanukkah one year.”