For Hester the remainder of the day was the meanest sort of torment. Trouble lay in her stomach like a small ticking bomb. It was Kristen’s day off, so she had a heavy work load. Her mouth was constantly dry, no matter how much water or coffee she sipped. Her bowels quaked often, and that meant a lot of trips to the bathroom. She couldn’t find items she had filed two days ago. She dialed wrong numbers and couldn’t seem to handle simple sentences during dictation. Dr. Roth was hard-pressed to conceal his irritation.
Even with all these difficulties four-thirty arrived too soon. Suddenly there it was, on the clock in front of her. What had happened to three-thirty? Her lunch hour? Four thirty-one. Hester compensated for her panic with a mad rush. She gathered all the outgoing mail from the various offices; a lot of parcels today, almost enough to fill two shopping bags. Her coat, her hat, her gloves. Lugging the shopping bags, she all but ran down the stairs to the kitchen. Her face was bright red, her pulse too rapid to count. If it didn’t happen now, she knew she would pass out.
Gillian, following her afternoon constitutional, was sitting at the butcher-block table a few feet from the door, nursing a cup of cocoa. Mrs. Cunningham and Mrs. Mayborn were smacking their lips over something that bubbled in a pot on the stove.
“Here comes the pony express,” Hester said, breezing on through, not daring to look directly at Gillian. But out of the corner of her eye she saw that Gillian had raised her head.
“Running late, Hester,” Mrs. Mayborn commented.
“It’s just been one hell of a day, Felicia.”
“I know; the boss almost snapped my head off over nothing.”
Hester bolted up the short flight of steps—six in all—to the back door, which was secured by a Medeco lock. The ultra-security lock required a special key. Hester put down the shopping bags and got out her copy of the key and opened the door. The cold air felt good. She turned and kicked over one of the shopping bags.
Envelopes and brown paper packages cascaded down the steps.
“Oh, well, shit,” Hester mumbled, scurrying down the steps after the mails. “Don’t bother,” she said, waving off Cunningham and the cook. All too soon she had the mail picked up, and Gillian hadn’t budged. Hester looked frantically at her. Gillian seemed witless and paralyzed, as if her nerve had failed.
For the love of God, Hester thought, move your ass!
And Gillian rose belatedly, creating no stir. She approached the steps mousy-meek and bent over.
“Here’s one you missed,” she said.
“Oh, thanks Gil—”
Then like a shot Gillian was out the door and running. She had remembered to give Hester enough of a shove so that Hester, rebounding, didn’t have to fake a well-timed shoulder into the midsection of Mrs. Cunningham, who, for all her size, was fast on her feet in an emergency.
Mrs. Cunningham, speechless and winded, still had enough strength to pitch Hester like a toy against the nearest wall. She stumbled up the steps, fumbling in a pocket of her cable knit sweater.
The gun, Hester thought, horrified; but it wasn’t a gun, it was a walkie-talkie.
“Security!” Mrs. Cunningham bawled as soon as she was on the sidewalk outside. “The girl is running. The girl is running. All units, Eighty-sixth westbound. Redline it! Redline it! Topguy One and Topguy Two, get your glasses on her!”
Hester was just out the door when someone else, running hard from the house, bumped her in passing and almost knocked her down. It was Maylun Chan We. Hester had no idea where she’d come from. But she was the fastest woman Hester had ever seen: even before Hester recovered her balance Maylun had sprinted around the stalled Cunningham, who was still yelling into her walkie-talkie, and around the back end of a fuel truck that was parked across the mouth of the mews and pumping oil for the apartment building; she headed up the street after Gillian.
There was plenty of other activity around Paragon Institute. Two ordinary looking sedans parked at the other end of the mews erupted with hidden flashers and bold sirens. But the oil truck had the exit blocked. Hester ran for her life, pursuing the fleet Maylun.
Rush-hour traffic had begun on Eighty-sixth, which would slow down other chase cars trying to move west from positions beside the park on East End, but Hester realized in an instant that Gillian, fast as she was and with a twenty-second head start on the long block, could not elude Maylun. Heads turned, other eyes clocked the race. Who would have thought the demure Chinese doctor was a former track star? Hester, running, was a battle with herself. Behind her sirens screamed for clearance on the clogged street. A car jumped up on the sidewalk and jumped back again.
Just make it to the corner, Hester pleaded in silence. Her lungs, already, were roasting like chickens on a spit. Gillian turned half around and looked shocked when she saw Maylun barely fifty feet behind her, running with long dependable strides. Go! Hester demanded, but Gillian needed no warning. Jumping over a taut dog leash, she made York Avenue and ducked to her right around the corner. Moments later Dr. Maylun Chan We followed her.
Hester was a faltering third. She came to the corner limping and gasping and thoroughly frightened.
Gillian had made it into the back of the boxy Checker cab, but Maylun had one hand on the door and leaned in as if to pull her out of the seat. Gillian shrank into the opposite corner. Hester tried to scream at Maylun, to distract her, but she was too concerned with sucking wind to utter a clarifying sound.
Then Maylun stepped back, slammed the door and turned away as the cab pulled out from the curb and soon became anonymous in an uptown burst of traffic.
Maylun was obviously surprised to see Hester leaning on a lamppost observing, but she kept her poise.
“Your idea?” Maylun said.
Hester stared open-mouthed at the doctor, then astonished herself by nodding.
“Wha—Maylun, why did you—”
“Because there are things I just can’t make myself accept,” Maylun explained.
“I know whi—”
“Yes, well, do you also know what our lives are worth if you don’t keep quiet?”
Hester managed a nod.
“Whoa—won’t say a thing.”
“Good,” Maylun said, and she quickly pressed Hester’s hand, sealing the conspiracy, just before they were caught up in a wave of MORG security teams.
When he heard Gillian retching in the back seat, Hester’s friend Walter, the cab driver, said, “Use the Kraft paper sack to heave in.”
Gillian put her head half in the sack and emptied her stomach. Walter turned on Ninety-first and drove as far as Park Avenue before the lights changed. Then he uncapped a thermos and poured a Styrofoam cup full of hot tea, which he handed back to Gillian. She was sitting upright and pale against the maroon seat back, pale with a strange luminescence; her skin was like neon. She accepted the tea.
“Hester said you might be sick from all the running,” Walter said. He had prematurely gray hair curling over his ears, a kind and ugly face like a Disney dwarf’s. “She told me about the bad situation you have with your boy friend. I can sympathize. Listen, don’t worry about the sack. I’ll throw it in the trash next red light. Like some music? How about QXR?”
“Okay.”
Walter drove down Park, moving peaceably in the midst of the rush-hour madness so as not to jar Gillian’s touchy stomach. She swallowed half the smoky tea, sipping slowly whenever a chill threatened to dislocate her bones and cause more retching.
“Here we are.”
Gillian had been totally unaware of the blocks going by. The sun, too, had set: there were just a few windows alight in the fair open sky, high spots above the blur of the fast-paced lower city. Street levels were junked in shadow and the air was filled with gritty blowing things. Gillian’s head roared at its own pace.
“Where?”
Walter indicated the theatre. They were on Thirty-third, near Lexington. The theatre was called the Director’s Chair. It showed revivals, double-and-triple-billed classics of
the silver screen.
“Here,” he said, smiling. He handed her a ticket of admission. Gillian sat numbly holding it. She didn’t know what to say or do. “Goodbye and good luck,” Walter told her. It seemed final. Gillian opened the door and got out. The wind traveled through her as if she were an empty cage.
“Don’t forget your coat.” Walter handed her a wool parka through the window. Then he drove off. The olive parka had a plaid lining. Gillian had never seen it before, but she put it on.
She looked uneasily up and down the street. She was nowhere she recognized. The wind climbed inside her coat, bit her earlobes and froze her neck before she did up the drawstrings of the hood. She turned round and around, eyes streaming neon. Gillian felt overcrowded by the occasional passerby, she was lashed to a sinking weight of the unfamiliar and the unasked-for. Simple to remember what Hester said, if only she put her mind to it. That would come. The tea she’d drunk had not fully satisfied her thirst, and her throat still rasped from vomiting, from breathing the wind in wrong. God oh God, my name is Gillian. A man with a mustache like a blackened bottle brush and dizzy tufted hair and a prop cigar regarded her with an indescribable passion from a poster in front of the movie house.
Her ticket was accepted at the door. It might be all right with Hester if she sat down for a little while; maybe, for all Gillian knew, she was supposed to do just that. An old-fashioned popcorn machine stood in the lobby and, watching the crisp white stuff spill from the kettle, she hungered. But she had no money. She promptly put her hands in the pockets of the parka and found a new five-dollar bill in each pocket. Hester made miracles. Breaking one of the fives, Gillian bought popcorn and chewing gum to clean her teeth after the popcorn. They didn’t sell soda. She had a long drink of tepid water at the fountain, then went down into the cubbyhole dark toward the lisping center of the screen. Pandemonium. Three fey clowns. Gags whizzing by almost faster than the ear could follow. Cocoanuts. There were perhaps a dozen dedicated old-movie buffs in the small theatre lapping it all up. Gillian sat right in the middle of the house, three seats in from the left-hand aisle.
Groucho said: Now over here—on this site we’re going to build an eye and ear hospital. This is going to be a site for sore eyes.
Then he said: Love flies out the door when money comes innuendo. And later he said:
But by then Gillian had finished most of her popcorn, and she had settled down half asleep inside her warm and hooded coat. To wait.
Wait for Hester to produce more of her miracles. God oh God I am Gillian. I was Gillian. It was almost the end of the world, but perhaps not too late for miracles. If not, then nothing left to do but die: die.
If only she knew how.
Hester had decided before she set foot in Roth’s office that the best defense was a whopping case of hysterics, which Roth unexpectedly touched off himself—there was a look in his own eyes that could only have been inspired by the nearness of the headsman’s ax. Dr. Irving Roth was in deep shit. So were they all, in a sense, but the ultimate responsibility for Gillian’s escape was his.
“Hester, Hester—stop it now, we’re not blaming you.”
“If you blame anyone,” Maylun said fearlessly, “blame me. I prescribed for Gillian. She shouldn’t have been able to run like that. Shouldn’t have occurred to her.”
“She’s a very unusual girl,” Roth said bleakly. “But we’ll find her. Could you for God’s sake do something about—?”
Maylun bathed Hester’s face in ice water. The phone on Roth’s desk was ringing. Phones were ringing all over Paragon Institute. Roth selected a line at random. It was Avery Bellaver returning an urgent call.
“I wonder if you could come over here right away?” Roth said.
In the MORG helicopter flying south over the Hudson River valley one of Childermass’s executives put the receiver of the scrambler phone on the hook and said to his boss, “No trace of the girl yet.”
It was not a thing easily said to a man infamous for the way he took bad news; but Childermass, in his shirtsleeves, just leaned way back in the lounge chair, his one hand lax behind his head. He looked out at the dark of night seeking rumors of the moon.
“Inside job.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Solve it, we’ll know where Gillian is.”
“I think so.”
“Tell them it sounds like the Chink to me. Tell them not to be subtle down there. Tell them no time for fucking subtleties, put her yellow tit in the old cider press.”
“What about the other one, Hester?”
Childermass didn’t like being presented with an alternative.
“Here I am giving you a million dollars’ worth of advice, and you’re listening less than a nickel’s worth.” He turned his thumb down decisively. “I met her. Not a brain in her head. Know your enemy. It’s the Yellow Peril every time. Somebody give me a smoke.”
He sat languidly with his cigarette, toe-tapping, thinking, whistling. Other men in the helicopter sent ugly coded messages, and were terrifying on the phone:
“Finny, fanny,” Childermass said under his breath. “Double whammy. Stars are falling on Alabamy.” His forehead creased deeply. He spat out a mouthful of smoke.
“And falling. And falling.”
Gillian awoke in the movie house feeling stuffy, and there was perspiration on her upper lip; she was too hot in the parka. She fumbled with the drawstrings of the hood and unzipped the coat. When she laid the hood back she discovered that someone was sitting in the seat next to her.
“You almost dropped your popcorn,” he said. “I saved it for you.” He handed her the container. By now the popcorn wasn’t any good, but Gillian smiled anyway.
“Thank you.” On the screen a bum had accosted Harpo. Could you help me out? he said. I’d like to get a cup of coffee. Whereupon Harpo reached into a pocket of his commodious trousers and handed the bum a cup of piping-hot coffee. The young man next to her laughed and laughed. Gillian, benumbed, wondered what movie she was watching.
“I don’t know how many times I’ve seen Harpo do that,” the young man commented, “but I always find it funny.”
Gillian looked politely at him, but he was already familiar. She’d spent her life around young men just like him. Given two guesses, she could have named his prep. Then—Princeton, of course, wasn’t he wearing a Princeton ring? Hands folded on top of the expensive cashmere topcoat in his lap. His nails were manicured and gleaming. His hair had been modishly styled to give dimension to a rather small but handsomely boned face. Even his choice of shaving lotion was predictable. He was trying to raise a mustache. He had to be older, but he looked about nineteen.
“My name is Bradford,” he said.
“Gillian.”
“Hello, Gillian.”
He laughed again as Groucho swindled a bartender. Gillian stirred in her hard seat and sighed. Bradford looked at her patiently for a long time. Gillian slowly crushed the popcorn container and picked part of her lower lip raw and then acknowledged him again by raising her eyes.
“Would you like to go home with me now?” he asked.
She felt a shiver of excitement, pleased that she didn’t have to sit there any longer in league with ghosts whose jokes were dated and whose humor seemed irrelevant, reflecting a lifestyle as remote as the chanson de geste. Still she was inclined to be cautious.
“Hester sent you?”
Bradford’s smile was fully reassuring.
“Of course,” he said.
Hester, after her ordeal, couldn’t bear riding the bus home, so she took a cab to the corner near her flat and did some necessary shopping at the superette. Then she picked up something for her head and something for her stomach at the drugstore, called for a package of laundry and fought the bitter wind to her doorstep. By that time she was starey-eyed and unsteady on her feet.
It was already after seven and she was damned worried about Gillian, but Gillian would be safe where she was for hours longer—until shortly afte
r midnight, according to the theatre schedule. Meanwhile Hester had other worries. Even though the men from MORG had been surprisingly gentle with her, asking only a few questions, it was not unlikely they’d followed her home. And why had Maylun disappeared so suddenly, leaving Roth to dissolve in his own grease? She’d never seen a man so shaken. Hester was suspicious and frightened. MORG was the enemy now, and MORG was powerful.
A note on her door from Meg Bundy: Scrabble tonight? Give us a buzz. Hester felt badly. She’d turned down their invitations so often of late they were going to think she was standoffish. As she unlocked her door she tried to frame a reasonable excuse. Can’t make it tonight, I’m harboring a fugitive. But thanks anyway.
Hester opened the door an inch, blocked it open with a foot, stooped for an armload of packages. She backed into her apartment, finding the wall switch by the door with a free finger. A lamp went on next to the sofa in the living room. The door slammed shut.
Hester turned around and all but died; groceries and laundry thudded to the floor.
Peter Sandza was standing in the middle of her living room, holding up a hand-printed sign. Printed with her lipstick.
DON’T TALK, the sign said. THEY ARE LISTENING.
Chapter Seventeen
Peter wouldn’t let her say a word but he held her lovingly, putting a hand over her mouth so she couldn’t weep aloud. With a remote control unit he turned on the television. Then he unbuttoned her coat, unzipped her skirt, skimmed her pantyhose down to her boot tops. Hester had never been screwed so urgently in her life. It was a fun rape. She came, either on the shag rug, or on the way down; afterward she couldn’t remember which.
No more headache; no more sour stomach and nerves; Hester had been purged. They did blissful erotic things to each other. In conjugation his strength had her glowing with vitality. Hester held Peter’s face in her steady hands, tongue flicking out to touch the tip of his nose, his salty eyelids.
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