Carlucci

by Richard Paul Russo

  Carlucci looked back and forth between Hong and LaPlace, but neither man had an answer for him.

  26

  “ETERNAL LIFE,” MIXER said. “That’s what’s getting people dead.”

  “Eternal life,” Paula repeated. It didn’t seem real. Maybe it wasn’t.

  They were sitting around the table in the kitchen of the Saints’ place: Paula, Mixer, St. Katherine, and St. Lucy. Early evening, dark outside, two bright overheads lighting the kitchen. On the table in front of Mixer was a stack of eight or nine discs. Chick’s discs.

  “Not eternal life,” St. Lucy said. “Life extension. It’s not the same thing.”

  “Close enough,” Mixer said. “People who will want it won’t make the distinction. Or won’t care. And who won’t want it?”

  “I’ve heard rumors about New Hong Kong all my adult life,” Paula said. “Rumors about this, the New Hong Kong medicos finding the key to life extension. Nothing ever happened, and I stopped paying attention a long time ago. Now you’re telling me it’s for real?”

  “Maybe,” St. Lucy said. “Yes, it’s for real, though it appears that they don’t have all the answers yet. But they’re probably very close.” She pointed at the discs. “It’s laid out here, what they’re trying to do, the directions they’re working in, how they’re going about it. Not a complete picture, but enough.”

  “What do you mean by not complete?”

  “We’ve got eleven images, eleven ‘pages,’ you could say. But there are at least twelve. We’re missing Part Seven. We can’t find it anywhere.”

  “It’s possible Chick never even had it,” Mixer put in.

  “And there might be more than twelve,” St. Lucy said. “But it probably doesn’t matter. All the parts most likely would still provide only an incomplete picture. The key thing is, what’s on these discs would be enough for some other group with sufficient resources to start up their own research program along the same lines. Atlantis Two, for example. Gottingen Gesellschaft, for another, or any of the other big biotechs. Any of those people would be willing to pay a fortune for what’s on these discs.”

  “Okay,” Paula said. “So tell me what’s on the discs.”

  “We brought in someone to make the text translations first,” St. Katherine said. “Someone we felt we could trust. But when he’d finished, and he’d given us the translation, we realized what this was worth, and we were no longer sure about him. This is one hell of a temptation.”

  “So what did you do, kill the translator?”

  St. Katherine smiled. “No, of course not. But we do have him…in protective custody until we decide what to do next.” St. Katherine shrugged. “He understands. It’ll all work out.”

  “And what about the medical expert you were going to bring in?” Paula asked.

  “We brought her in next, and she confirmed what we and the translator had guessed at. She’s a doctor, the one who kept Minor Danzig alive after the trial. The texts are highly technical and advanced, and she didn’t understand some of the details, had to make some guesses of her own, but it’s pretty clear what they’re after, and how they’re going about it.”

  “Is she in protective custody, too?”

  St. Katherine shook her head, smiling again. “No. She’s my sister, and I’ve trusted her with my life more than once. I trust her with this. She also has serious reservations about their research methods, and their projected treatments.”

  “What kind of reservations?”

  “Moral.”

  Paula was almost afraid to ask. “Why?”

  St. Lucy sighed heavily. “They’re doing all their primary experimentation on people, that much is clear. Testing and evaluation on human subjects. Teresa, Saint Katherine’s sister, feels fairly certain that a lot of the evaluation has to be done through autopsies. Or vivisection. Neither option is a pleasant one.”

  “Jesus,” Paula whispered. “Where are they getting…?” She didn’t finish the question, the most obvious answer leaping into her thoughts. “The recruiting vans.”

  “Probably,” Mixer said. “Probably some other source as well, because a lot of the people the vans pull in aren’t in such great health, and we’re not sure how much use they’d be. Except as a source of raw materials.”

  “Raw materials?”

  “My sister thinks the longevity treatments themselves involve live tissue, blood products, brain tissue.”

  “So we’ve got testing done on human subjects, followed by autopsies or vivisection, and treatments developed from materials harvested from other human beings.”

  St. Lucy nodded.

  “And this is what Chick was selling,” Paula said. “A blueprint for this fucking shit.”

  “I doubt he had a clue,” Mixer said. “He didn’t read Chinese. Probably all he knew was that it was about longer life, and he knew that was worth a fortune.”

  Paula looked again at the discs. This was what Chick died for. Fucking great. “Longer life,” she said. “How much longer? Forty, fifty years?”

  Mixer laughed.

  St. Lucy shook her head. “They don’t know for sure, of course; they won’t until somebody actually does it, but the text in these things,” she said, pointing at the discs, “talks about a lot more than that. A hundred and fifty, maybe even two hundred extra years. Bringing the aging process nearly to a complete halt.”

  “And they want it now,” Mixer said. “There’s not going to be any miracle of reversing the aging process, and who wants to live an extra hundred years as a decrepit old fuck with a body that’s falling apart? No, you want to start this as young as possible.”

  “But you don’t think they actually have it yet,” Paula said.

  “Teresa doesn’t think so,” St. Katherine said. “Another guess on her part, but it’s probably a good guess. Two things, she says. One, that’s the impression she gets from the text, the way they talk about promising avenues, dead ends. Two, if they thought they had it—and they’ll never be sure, of course, until someone tries it and lives for an extra two hundred years—but if they thought they had the answer, they wouldn’t be able to keep it secret. They’ll want customers, for one thing. They probably won’t care so much then. But for now, they’re still experimenting. They can’t afford to let this get out. They don’t want the competition, and they don’t want the bad PR.”

  “They’ve got to keep their stream of fresh bodies coming in,” Mixer said.

  “Jesus Christ,” Paula said. She remembered sitting with Tremaine in his car at Hunter’s Point, watching the huge crates being unloaded from Jenny Woo’s van. Bodies, Tremaine had said. He’d been right.

  No one said anything for a long time. Paula kept staring at the discs, as if they had some kind of answer for her. Hell, they had the answers for someone.

  “What do we do with it?” she finally asked.

  “We were hoping you would have an answer to that,” Mixer said.

  “Me?”

  Mixer nodded. “Chick paid for this with his life.” He put his hand on the stack of discs, then pushed it toward her. “They’re yours now. You tell us what we should do.”

  Paula didn’t know what to say. St. Katherine put her hand over Mixer’s, looking at Paula.

  “Minor said you would know what to do. He said you would know what’s right.”

  Paula stared at the discs again. She would know what was right? Maybe they should just destroy the discs, pretend they’d never seen them. As soon as she thought about it, though, she realized it would be pointless. There had to be something else.

  “I think we should give them to Carlucci,” Paula eventually said. “We should give him the discs, and tell him what we know. He’s stuck his neck out trying to find out what happened to Chick. And I trust him.”

  “Passing the buck?” Mixer said, smiling. “Let Carlucci decide?”

  “No. He might not take them. But he probably knows more about this than we do. He might be able to do something, use them to stop this
shit somehow.” Mixer snorted, and Paula said, “You have a better idea?”

  Mixer looked at St. Katherine, then at St. Lucy. They both nodded, and he turned back to Paula. “Okay,” he said. “We give them to Carlucci.”

  Carlucci stood at the head of the alley, in a warm, steadily falling drizzle, and watched the flames of the barrel fires ahead of him. His raincoat kept his clothes dry, but he wore no hat, and his hair and face were wet. He felt certain the last of the answers were waiting for him down this alley. He didn’t know if that was going to be good or bad.

  He had been home from work for an hour, settling in to watch a movie with Andrea and Christina, when the call from Paula had come. Brief and simple.

  “We’ve got something for you,” Paula had said. “You’ll want this.” Then, before he’d had a chance to reply, “Do you remember where Saint Lucy brought you?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll be waiting for you.”

  He’d known, then. Something in Paula’s voice. She had the answers. She knew.

  So here he was, in a warm and strange, heavy mist that softened the sounds of the Tenderloin night. Carlucci entered the alley, approaching a barrel fire surrounded by several men and women and sizzling from the mist and a rack of fish grilling above the flames. A man held out a brown bottle, said, “Want a beer, paisan? We’ve got plenty.” Carlucci shook his head, said, “No thanks,” and continued along the alley.

  He passed another barrel fire and slowed, searching the building wall, hoping to recognize the right door. A cloaked figure stepped out of an alcove and stood directly in front of him. St. Lucy. She smiled briefly, touched his arm, then turned back and opened the door for him.

  Inside the building, they didn’t speak. St. Lucy led the way upstairs to the same small kitchen where he’d first seen Mixer after his trial. This time the kitchen was full: Mixer and Paula Asgard, and a tall, beautiful woman who had to be St. Katherine; and now St. Lucy and himself. On the table was a stack of media discs in cases, maybe ten of them.

  “Please, sit down,” St. Lucy said.

  Carlucci hung his coat on the chair, face and hair still dripping. St. Lucy got a towel for him, while Mixer got up and put coffee and tea and a bottle of Scotch in the middle of the table, white ceramic mugs all around.

  “Thanks for coming,” Paula said.

  “Sure.” Carlucci finished drying off, set the towel on the counter, and sat. He tried to read their expressions, tried to guess whether what he was about to hear was going to be good or bad. But he couldn’t tell much from their faces, only that he was in for something serious, and he’d already known that. Then, everyone at the table watching him, it began.

  Mixer and Paula, with occasional help from the two Saints, told Carlucci first where the discs had come from…and then everything they knew about what was on them—the translations and diagrams, the certainties and the probabilities and the guesses; what New Hong Kong was working on, and how they were doing it. Life extension and autopsies and vivisection and bodies harvested for longevity treatments. Everything.

  Carlucci asked a few questions as they talked, but mostly he listened. He grew increasingly tired and depressed as all the final pieces now came together, shifting into place. It was as bad as he’d expected.

  “You don’t seem all that surprised,” Paula said when they were done.

  Carlucci managed a slight smile. “I’m not, really.” He paused, thinking. “I didn’t realize it at the time, but I’ve had two rather oblique offers of a couple hundred extra years of life if I would forget about all this and bury a couple of murder cases.”

  “Now you can take them up on it,” Mixer said.

  Carlucci gave a short laugh. “Yeah, sure. I doubt the offers are still good.” He looked directly at Mixer. “I know why the mayor wanted you dead.”

  “Tell me.”

  Carlucci did. He told them about Jenny Woo and the rigged body-bags. “You were bootlegging the body-bags with her and Chick,” Carlucci said. “The mayor knew you and Chick were friends. He assumed you knew what was going on.”

  “I didn’t,” Mixer said.

  “I believe you.”

  Mixer turned to Paula. “You believe me, don’t you?”

  Paula nodded. “I’ve never trusted anyone more,” she said. She reached out and took his hand of metal and flesh, squeezed it gently.

  “There’s more,” Carlucci said.

  “How much more?” Paula asked. “Something about Chick?”

  Carlucci nodded. “Yes, about Chick.” He told them some of what he had learned from Sparks and Tremaine, about Chick and the nephew and the mayor and New Hong Kong. He even told them a little—leaving out names and details—of what had been going on inside the police force, the orders to bury cases, the pressure from the mayor.

  “So now what?” Carlucci asked when he was done.

  “We were hoping you might know,” Mixer said.

  “Me.”

  “It was Paula’s idea to come to you.”

  “You looked into this mess when no one else would,” Paula said. “You’ve been working on it from the beginning, taking risks. We thought you might be able to do something with the discs. Or you’d know what we could do with them. Something, maybe, to stop all this.”

  Carlucci didn’t say anything for a long time. He felt lost, unsure if he could find a way through this. The last of the answers had been here all right, but that didn’t mean he knew what to do with them. He looked around the table, then reached for the Scotch and filled his cup. “Give me an hour alone to think, all right?”

  Paula looked at the others and nodded. The four of them got up from the table, and left the room.

  Paula and Mixer sat on the fire escape outside Mixer’s room, drinking beer and watching the container fires in the alley below them. The rain had become little more than a light, falling mist, warm on Paula’s skin. The alley was filled with shadows, figures moving in and out of the firelight, music pounding from a boomer across the way, bells ringing somewhere out on the street. Loud cracks, maybe gunshots, but they were far away, maybe not even in the Tenderloin. Paula could see white and red lights of vehicles moving along the streets at either end of the alley.

  “What do you think Carlucci’s going to say?” Mixer asked.

  Paula shrugged. “I almost don’t care anymore.”

  “Two hundred extra years,” Mixer said. “Live into the twenty-third century.”

  “Christ, who would want to?” Paula drank from her beer and shook her head.

  “I would,” Mixer replied. “I almost died. Didn’t like it. I like being alive, and I’d like the chance to keep on doing it as long as possible.” He snorted. “I won’t get the chance, though.”

  “No,” Paula agreed. “Neither of us will. If they find the answer up in New Hong Kong, only the rich and the big sharks will get a shot at it. We won’t get shit.” She shook her head again. “Fuck ’em. Let them have it.”

  Mixer laughed. “Yeah, well…Not everyone’s going to take that attitude.”

  Paula looked at him and smiled. “No, they won’t. That’ll at least make it a little rougher for those rich fucks.”

  In the building across the alley, one floor down and just to the left, Paula could see a man and a woman standing next to each other by the open window. Their shoulders were pressed together, and they were talking, smiling. She heard the woman laugh, then saw her pull back and playfully slap the man’s shoulder. The man grinned, then put his arms around the woman, and they held each other, the woman digging her face into the man’s neck.

  “You love her, don’t you?” Paula asked.

  “Saint Katherine? Yeah, I guess I do.”

  “It won’t be easy,” Paula said.

  “No,” Mixer replied. “But maybe easier than you think. We’ve both got gashes scorched in our brains, and they seem to match in a way. It’ll work out.”

  “I hope so.”

  “What about you and Tremaine?”<
br />
  Paula shook her head. “Who knows? All this crap, we’ve never had much of a chance.”

  “This will all be over soon, one way or another.”

  “You think?”

  Mixer nodded “Yeah, whatever Carlucci decides, there’s going to be some kind of explosion. He won’t just let it go. Not tomorrow, maybe not for a week or two, but it’ll happen.” He stared down at the container fires. “And when it does, I’ve got something in mind for Mayor Terrance Kashen.”

  Paula looked at him. “What, Mixer?”

  Mixer shook his head. “We’ll never have to worry about him again. That fuck.” He wouldn’t say anything more.

  Paula looked away from him, back to the couple across the alley. “Chick sure got himself into something this time, didn’t he?”

  “You still miss him,” Mixer said.

  “Yeah. Always will. I don’t know why. He could be a real asshole, sometimes.” She smiled, looking at Mixer. “I guess you know that, don’t you?”

  Mixer nodded. “Mostly, he just didn’t think. He never really meant to be an asshole.”

  “No.” Paula finished off her beer, resisted the temptation to throw it over the side of the fire escape. She set it beside her and pressed her face into the railing bars.

  “I’ve got to start playing again,” she said. “I’ve bailed out on so many gigs lately, Sheela and Bonita are about ready to get a new bass player. Besides, I really miss it. I need it.”

  Mixer put his hands on her neck, worked at the tightened muscles. “Then do it,” he said. He continued to massage her neck and shoulders for several minutes, strong and hard with his left hand, noticeably weaker with the right. The pain felt good, loosened the knots, but she imagined it must be hard on his injured hand and arm. She put her hands over his and stopped them. “Thanks,” she said.

  “Everything’ll be okay,” Mixer said.

  Paula laughed once and shook her head. “No it won’t.”

  “No,” Mixer agreed. “It won’t.”

  Paula pressed her face harder into the bars and stared down at the flames below.

  Carlucci sat at the kitchen table and drank bad Scotch, trying to think. The alcohol wasn’t going to help him, but he drank anyway, relishing the burning warmth it sent out from his belly. He stared at the stack of discs. Two hundred extra years of life. It wouldn’t matter if it was five hundred, it would never do Caroline any good. She would still die before she was thirty. The thought of himself and the rest of his family living to be over two hundred years old while Caroline never made it out of her twenties made him ill. He knew it wasn’t logical, that they were all going to significantly outlive Caroline anyway, but it still seemed somehow obscene to him.