The Fifth Vial

by Michael Palmer

  “I hadn’t thought that far ahead,” Fred replies.

  Totally silly, totally profound.

  Ben reached Fadiman just after noon. The sleepy town looked as if it might have been used as the set for Peter Bogdanovich’s classic The Last Picture Show. It was definitely more substantial than Curtisville, Florida, home of Schyler Gaines’s gas station and mini-mart, but the gestalt of the two places was not dissimilar. The wooden sign on the edge of town, peeling and punctuated with more than a few bullet holes, announced that Fadiman was firmly rooted in yesterday, with hands reaching out to tomorrow. From what Ben could discern from the ride into the center of town, the main industries bridging yesterday and tomorrow were motor-home and RV sales, and self-storage facilities. There were three of each on this side of town alone.

  With a growing need for food and a bathroom, but otherwise no more of a plan than the cartoon character hunting for alligators, Ben rolled slowly down Main Street—four or five traffic lights long, and wide in the way only midwestern Main Streets were wide. He counted five taverns, all of which served food, but none of which looked as if it would be sanctioned by any health authority to do so. He wasn’t really that picky about ambiance, and he certainly was no gourmet, but he had only recently gotten off Zantac and Maalox, and was enjoying an uneasy truce with his stomach. On another pass up the street he spotted a couple of restaurants he had missed—Mother Molly’s and the Hungry Coyote. The choice was easy.

  Molly’s, done in a motif of genuine cowboy and ranch regalia, was actually larger and quainter than Ben had anticipated. Booths with red leather and dark wood were arranged around the outside, tables with red-checked paper place mats in the center. About a third of the seats were occupied. Ben was beginning to feel the fatigue of his early wake-up and the long drive. Still, he debated ordering a Coors with his mushroom and cheddar steerburger before opting instead for the caffeine boost of a Coke. The beer could wait. There was work to be done.

  MapQuest had taken him to Fadiman easily enough, but had failed to come up with anything like a John Hamman Highway. In the Whitestone lab in Soda Springs he felt certain he had read the name correctly. Now, he wasn’t so confident. As he worked on his lunch, he imagined himself with a rope and net, watching an endless line of alligators marching past.

  What now?

  First things first, he decided finally, and motioned his waitress over. She was a husky, grandmotherly woman with close-cut silver hair and a calm competent demeanor that suggested things seldom got her down. Her name tag read CORA.

  “Excuse me, Cora, I’m looking for John Hamman Highway. Can you help me out?”

  She looked at him quizzically and then shook her head. At that moment, the other waitress working the lunch shift passed by.

  “Hey, Micki,” Cora said, softly enough not to disturb the customers, “John Hamman Highway. You ever heard of that?”

  “I’m looking for the Whitestone Laboratory,” Ben added.

  “Never heard of that either,” Cora said.

  “Isn’t John Hamman Highway the same as Lawtonville Road?” Micki asked. “They changed the name a year or so ago, ’member?”

  “An’ named it after that Lawtonville boy who got that medal for gettin’ killed in Iraq. I remember.”

  “Exactly. Just follow Main Street west an’ when it forks, take the right one. Don’t know of any Whitestone Laboratory, though.”

  “Well, thanks,” Ben said, relieved that the road existed at all. “I’ll find it.”

  “In fact you will.”

  The affirmation had come from the man seated alone in the next booth. He was in his mid- to late thirties, with a square jaw, widely spaced eyes, and a dense mat of curly brown hair.

  “You know Whitestone Laboratory?” Ben asked, sensing from the lack of interaction between him and the waitresses that he wasn’t local.

  “I’m going to work there tomorrow.”

  “You a chemist of some sort?”

  “Me?” The man laughed at the notion. “Heck no. I’m a flight attendant. Friend of mine, works with me at Southwest, makes extra money doing a private gig for Whitestone, only he can’t make it this time and turned it over to me. Seth Stepanski.”

  Ben shook the man’s hand and rated his grip at least a seven out of ten.

  “Ben,” he said, sensing that, unlike his fictional heroes, he would fumble if he tried to make up a name on the spot, “Ben Callahan.”

  Without waiting to be asked, Stepanski put a bill on his table and swung around to take the seat opposite Ben.

  “You expected at Whitestone?” he asked.

  “Nope,” Ben said, now thinking faster, and ready to ad-lib in any way he could to keep Seth Stepanski engaged, although clearly the man was grateful for company. “I sell lab equipment, and the lab director at Whitestone contacted us about an upgrade.”

  “Well, I’m not sure they’re open for business today,” Stepanski said. “I’m from Corsicana, south of Dallas. The drive here took a lot less than I had planned for, and I ended up getting in here last night, so I drove out there this morning to see if maybe they needed some help with the plane.”

  “And?”

  “I never even made it close to the buildings. High fencing all the way around, barbed wire on top. Looks like a maximum-security prison without the guard towers. It’s way out there in the middle of the desert. Nothing, and I mean nothing around. I could make out a bunch of buildings in the distance, but when I rang the bell at the gate and told them who I was, this woman told me I wasn’t expected until tomorrow afternoon and there was no one around to take care of me today.”

  Ben was totally intrigued.

  “So you’re flying out late tomorrow?”

  “No, no, Thursday morning. Apparently they have a place for me to stay tomorrow night.”

  “But not tonight.”

  “Not tonight,” Stepanski echoed.

  “Sounds like I may end up waiting until tomorrow, too.”

  “It’s about a ten-mile drive each way. Maybe you should call. Not doing that was my mistake.”

  “I’ll do it.”

  “If you need a motel, the Quality Inn where I’m staying is as good as any.”

  “Thanks,” Ben said, searching for ways to expand their conversation. “Hey listen, why don’t I call and see if my contact at Whitestone is there? If she’s not, maybe we can go find some cowboy bar, have us a couple of beers, an’ maybe play some darts.”

  Did I just start speaking with a twang? Ben wondered as he put a twenty on the table and headed out to the Rover, allegedly to get his cell phone and the Whitestone number. He reminded himself that while his paperback heroes might know precisely how to handle this situation, for him, every move was a swim through uncharted waters.

  Seth Stepanski was anything but interesting. His hobby seemed to be watching TV and breasts in clubs, and his main goal in life seemed to be finding a replacement for a woman named Sherry, who had dropped him when he didn’t come through with a proposal in a timely fashion.

  They were drinking beer in a booth in a dimly lit bar named, simply, Charlie’s, and were working their way into their second hour and third beer together.

  “Women like to date flight attendants because they get to fly almost anywhere cheap,” he said, his speech just a bit thickened.

  “I can see where that might be a plus,” Ben said, having realized that he needn’t worry about keeping their conversation going, merely directed.

  Sadly, after the initial spurt of promising information at Mother Molly’s, Stepanski had dried up. He wasn’t sure of the destination of his flight, and had absolutely no idea who would be aboard. He did know that wherever they were headed, he would need his passport, and that they wouldn’t be staying wherever it was for more than two or three days. He also added that what he was about to be paid was equivalent to a month’s salary at Southwest.

  Given what Alice Gustafson had learned about Whitestone, Ben wondered if some executives mi
ght be flying back to England. He was trying to think of anything else he might ask when Stepanski’s eyes widened and he gestured out the window.

  “Holy shit! Look at that rig.”

  Ben swung around and suspected that his eyes had widened, too. Rolling slowly up the street, like a sleek, invading spaceship, was a metallic gray Winnebago Adventurer—the Winnebago Adventurer, he felt certain, as he strained to see if Vincent was at the wheel.

  “Goodness,” he murmured.

  “Two hundred thousand, I’ll bet,” Stepanski exclaimed, whistling for emphasis. “Maybe more. A rolling hotel.”

  Right idea, Ben thought. Wrong H word.

  They watched in awed silence as the impressive RV eased down Main Street headed west. Ben knew the alligator had just jumped into his net. The next move was up to him.

  It took most of the afternoon and several hours away from Seth Stepanski for Ben to formulate a plan, convince himself that it was a good idea, and finally put the pieces together. He felt focused and keen, but also more than a little apprehensive. There were a thousand possibilities that could go wrong, some of which might merely mess things up, some of which might kill him.

  The story he used to get free of Stepanski was a stretch, even more so when Alice Gustafson didn’t answer her office phone. His alternative plan required a call to his cell phone from Althea Satterfield.

  “Whatever I say, Mrs. Satterfield, you just listen,” he told her slowly, having gone to the Rover on the pretext of getting a map. “Don’t say a word. Not a word.”

  “I listen,” she repeated. “I’m a very good listener, dear.”

  “I know you are. Okay, five minutes and you call me on the cell phone number.”

  “The number I have right here.”

  “Exactly. How’s Pincus?”

  “Oh, he’s just fine, dear. Why just a few hours ago he—”

  “Okay, Mrs. Satterfield, call me in exactly five minutes from…now.”

  His performance, while Althea listened in Chicago and Stepanski listened across the booth, was worthy of an Oscar. In the end, the flight attendant believed that Ben’s boss had contacted their Whitestone Laboratory client and arranged a business meeting for the two of them at the woman’s home in Pullman Hills, ten miles to the east of Fadiman. The trick from then until Ben was ready would be to keep from being spotted by Stepanski driving around town.

  “I’ll register at the Quality Inn when I get back,” Ben said as they split up on the street outside of Charlie’s. “Save your appetite and we’ll have dinner together if you’d like.”

  It was nearly eight when Ben stopped by the motel and picked up his new friend. Everything was in place but Ben’s resolve, which seemed to be wavering from minute to minute. At a quarter of ten, with the town drifting off to sleep, they finished their Texas-sized steaks at a place called the Rodeo Grille, and headed back to the Rover through a largely empty parking lot.

  “Before we call it a night,” Ben said, having pumped the man for as much personal information as possible, “I have something I want to show you.”

  They drove north for almost twenty minutes. There was some evidence along the way that Fadiman was expanding in that direction, but it would be years, maybe decades before civilization filled in the spaces. If Stepanski was curious about their destination, five beers and a huge meal kept him from voicing it.

  Finally, Ben pulled into the driveway of Budget Self-Storage, the first of such businesses he had passed on his way in from Oklahoma. The neon sign was off, the small office dark.

  “What’s out here?” Stepanski asked, clearly unconcerned about the man with whom he had spent much of the day.

  They passed the row of corrugated steel units in the front, and went to the far end of the second row. That was where Ben pulled over.

  “So, Seth,” he said, “we need to talk.”

  “What in the hell is—?”

  The flight attendant stopped short when he realized that Ben was almost casually pointing a pistol at a spot between his eyes.

  Twenty-Three

  But then, if I am right, certain professors of education must be wrong when they say that they can put knowledge into the soul which was not there before, like sight into blind eyes.

  —PLATO, The Republic, Book VII

  Despite her seat in first class, Natalie’s flight back to Rio was not pleasant. Three times, maybe four, the powerful images of the cab ride from the airport to the slums—favelas, her mother said they were called—and the assault against her intruded into her thoughts. It didn’t seem to matter whether she was awake or asleep. The reenactment—“reexperience” would be a more appropriate word—continued to be jagged: totally vivid and absorbing one moment, vague and ill-defined the next, more like a bad trip than a bad memory.

  Once she woke up gasping and hyperventilating, with a sheen of perspiration across her forehead and lip.

  “Are you all right?” the elderly Brazilian man next to her asked.

  He was a jovial widower returning home after visiting his children and grandchildren in the States, and as a retired teacher, spoke English quite well.

  “I’m fine, fine,” she replied. “Just getting over a virus is all.”

  “Here,” said the man, handing her a sheet that was clearly an e-mail printout. “My son in Worcester gave this to me. You may know that we who are from Rio de Janeiro are called Cariocas. Well, this humorous piece, ‘Places to Visit in Rio,’ was written by a Carioca reporter for this wonderful publication: A Gringo’s Guide to Brazil.”

  The tongue-in-cheek list, though it would have been quite funny if read in the right circumstances, was hardly the cure for Natalie’s “virus.” There were fourteen items altogether, including:

  Downtown the street vendor riots are spectacular, comparable, perhaps, to the salmon runs in the Yukon.

  Mangueria Hill by night is for those brave souls who love fireworks displays. Not the kind from Roman candles, but the kind from .38 Specials.

  Like to watch violent and shocking movies? None of them can compare to any police station in Rio. As the cops like to say, “This is where a child cries and not even his mother hears.”

  Sick of your hometown bums and jerks? Try ours. They can be found legislating in the halls of our State Assembly.

  The Central Station rest rooms. After 10 p.m. they are no-man’s-land—the world’s biggest bordello. Just pick a sex.

  Natalie smiled palely and passed the sheet back.

  “I feel better already,” she said.

  Before leaving her apartment for Boston’s Logan, Natalie had considered and quickly rejected the notion of taking a cab or a bus from the airport in Rio to her hotel. Instead, she went online and reserved a hard-top Jeep. Now, as she pulled out of the Jobim Airport and cruised south on the expressway into the city, she tried to keep her breathing even and her pulse in check. Thanks largely to the unremitting flashbacks to her shooting, the two months that had passed since her ill-fated ride into the city might as easily have been six hours.

  The customers at the House of Love will adore you. You will be very happy there….

  It was mid-morning—cloudless and already warm. From time to time, as she drove, Natalie glanced off to her right, the direction she was fairly certain the cab had taken that night. There were shantytowns packed at the bottom of barren hillsides. Much farther up above them were lawns and palms and, with what must have been spectacular views toward the ocean, mansions. Somewhere, in one of those squalid, overcrowded favelas, she had been pulled from her cab and soon after, shot.

  The hotel she had chosen, the Rui Mirador, was given two stars by one of the online travel services, but was presented as quaint, clean, and safe—all words that resonated for her. It was in the Botafogo section of the city, described by the same service as both traditional and exciting. What Natalie cared about was that Botafogo was also where Santa Teresa Hospital was located.

  Traffic on the expressway was heavy, and the drivers s
omewhat less than courteous, but it didn’t take long for her to appreciate that thanks to years of driving in Boston, she was well prepared. In spite of her persistent edginess, Natalie felt herself drawn to the steep hills, lush vegetation, and spectacular architecture of the area. Botafogo was a fairly narrow corridor between Centro—the downtown—and the beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema. With the help of an excellent map, she found her way through the sometimes narrow streets to the Pasmado Overlook—the one tourist attraction she had promised herself, in addition, possibly, to the magnificent white-sand beaches. After the stop at Pasmado, it would be strictly business. She had no desire to linger in Rio, and planned to fly home as soon as the mystery of exactly who had cared for her and where was settled. The rest of the city, however spectacular and exciting, would forever remain unknown to her.

  Suddenly weary from the long flight, Natalie sank onto a bench at the overlook and gazed out across Guanabara Bay and up to the statue of Christ the Redeemer. Beautiful, she thought, realizing at the same time that she wasn’t experiencing the incredible sight in any emotional part of her being.

  “So, what do you think of our little statue?”

  Startled, Natalie turned to the heavily accented voice. A uniformed policeman stood close by, right hand resting on his short, black rubber nightstick. He was swarthy, well built, and handsome in a matinee idol sort of way, with narrow features and a hawk’s dark eyes. The name tag pinned over his breast pocket read VARGAS.

  “It’s very beautiful, very moving,” she said. “How did you know I was American?”

  “You look Brazilian, but next to you is a dead giveaway that you are a tourist.” The officer gestured to the map on the bench beside her. “A guess that any tourist is American would be right more often than wrong.”

  Natalie managed a smile.

  “My family is from Cape Verde. Are you local police?”

  “Military, actually.”