Perfect People

by Peter James

  She opened it, but instantly her head swam. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, fighting back a sudden, sharp bout of nausea, convinced for a moment that she was going to throw up. She glanced at John, but said nothing. Wondering. Fourteen days.

  Was fourteen days too soon for morning sickness?

  John’s phone rang and he answered it. It was a young, eager postdoc fellow he had recently taken on called Sarah Neri. ‘Sorry I was out when you rang earlier,’ she said.

  ‘No problem. Did you get any information?’

  ‘Yes, there’s a whole ton of stuff. It’s a website connected to the Lloyd’s Register, and the Serendipity Rose is on it. She has a sister ship operated by a cruise line, and all the information you requested is on the cruise company’s website. I’ll email it all to you.’

  ‘Give me the beats of it now.’

  Sarah Neri ran through the key points. Then after he had hung up, he began doing some calculations in his head.

  The Serendipity Rose weighed twenty-five thousand tonnes. She had four six-thousand-horsepower engines.

  Sarah had found out for him the price of the fuel. The ship was burning around seventeen thousand gallons a day of heavy fuel oil. He figured maintenance, insurance, harbour dues and the fuel costs of the helicopter. Then there was Dettore. Two junior doctors. Three nurses. Two lab technicians. Then all the staff running the ship. The total wage bill would have to be around two million dollars per annum, even assuming the Filipino crew were being paid poorly.

  Twenty thousand dollars a day, bottom end, he calculated, and he could be way under in this estimate. The total charge to himself and Naomi had been four hundred thousand dollars. They were there for thirty days. Thirteen thousand, three hundred dollars a day. They had only seen one other couple on the ship, George and Angelina, and the couple who had left as they had arrived. For the first two weeks, Dettore had spent the major portion of each day with himself and Naomi. For the next fortnight, after Naomi had been impregnated, they only saw him briefly once a day, for little more than a courtesy visit. A revolving cycle of three couples on the ship at any one time seemed probable.

  Which would produce roughly thirty-nine thousand, nine hundred dollars a day. At these prices Dettore can’t be covering his costs or making any profit.

  Why not? If profit wasn’t his agenda, what was?

  ‘John!’

  He glanced at Naomi, startled out of his thoughts by her voice. ‘What?’

  ‘You’ve driven past our turn-off.’

  14

  Ten weeks later, in his seventh-floor office at the Cedars-Sinai hospital, the obstetrician was distracted. He was talking to Naomi but his mind was altogether somewhere else. Dressed in white scrubs and plimsolls that reminded Naomi of Dettore on the ship, Dr Rosengarten was a small, slender, camp man in his late forties, with a nasal voice, wispy bleached hair and a tan with a slightly yellowish hue that made Naomi suspect it came from a tube rather than the Southern Californian sunshine.

  She did not dislike him, but equally, he was too aloof for her to warm to. And she found the ornately varnished and gilded Louis XIV furniture, the tasselled drapes and the displays of jade and onyx objets d’art slightly absurd in such a modern setting as this building. It felt more like a boudoir than a consulting room – which was exactly the effect Dr Rosengarten intended, she presumed. No doubt its faux-grandeur impressed some of his clientele.

  To her surprise, after all the meticulous care and planning on the ship, Dr Dettore had not offered any kind of immediate follow-up. There was just his ‘Post-Conception Guidelines’ booklet, a suggested reading list of books and websites about the unborn foetus, covering a range of topics from nutrition to spiritual welfare, and a regime of vitamin and mineral supplements. It seemed that once they had climbed out of his helicopter at LaGuardia airport they were out of his care – and out of his life. All he had requested was notification when Luke was born, for his records, and a further consultation to be arranged when Luke was three years old.

  She wondered if Dettore’s lack of interest was a reflection on how little of his package they had selected. Although he had kept up his charm towards them, she had sensed a hint of coolness and impatience creeping in towards the end.

  It did surprise her that there was no obstetrician or paediatrician in Los Angeles whom he particularly recommended, and that he had simply told them to be guided by their own doctor. For the money they had spent, Naomi thought, she had been expecting some kind of well-planned after-care.

  Their own doctor had suggested the same obstetrician, in Santa Monica, who had delivered Halley. But her best friend in LA, Lori Shapiro, had rejected him outright, and not because of the associations with Halley. Lori was married to a fabulously rich radiologist, Irwin, who knew all the medics in the area. Dr Rosengarten was the man to see. She’d had all three of her kids delivered by Dr Rosengarten, and both Irwin and Lori assured her and John that he was the best in the city – reeling off the names of all the A-list celebrities whose babies he had brought into the world.

  Naomi and John had been pleased to go somewhere else. They were relieved at severing this tie with Halley and their past. And looking at the plush surroundings, John was grateful that one perk of being employed by the university was membership of their excellent professorial health insurance scheme.

  Rosengarten’s secretary opened the door, a willowy blonde Californian beauty, underweight and as friendly as ice, who mouthed something to the doctor.

  ‘You’ll have to forgive me,’ he said. ‘One of my clients is in labour three weeks early.’ He raised a finger to his lips. ‘She’s like – I can’t tell you her name, obviously, you’ll read about in the papers tomorrow. Be right back!’ He gave them a patronizing smile, and disappeared out of the door for the third time.

  John felt like punching his lights out. Naomi lay on the examination bench in her open gown, a pool of gel on her abdomen, while his nurse explained, ‘Dr Rosengarten is under a lot of pressure today.’

  ‘Great,’ said John, taking Naomi’s hand, and staring at the swirly grey-and-white images on the monitor. ‘Tell him how sorry I feel for him.’

  The nurse, who appeared to have a sense of humour bypass said, ‘Yes, I will tell him.’

  After several long minutes the obstetrician returned. ‘OK, right, now, I can confirm viability, Mrs Klaesson and – ah – Dr Klaesson. Everything looks normal, it’s twelve weeks and the foetus is healthy, and the results of the nuchal thickness scan are good.’ Dr Rosengarten let them absorb this for a moment then added, ‘Would you like to know the sex?’

  Naomi glanced at John, who gave her a conspiratorial grin. She smiled thinly back and looked away. She was feeling lousy, very queasy, as she had been for weeks, and had thrown up just before coming here. Taking her handkerchief out, she dabbed spittle from her lips; her mouth was constantly filling with it.

  Through the double-glazing came the blattering, grinding howl of a drill down in the street, seven storeys below. She could see the grey concrete wall of the Beverly Center close by, through the pall of dust rising up from the roadworks, and made a mental note to go there at the weekend, to see if she could find some new bras and some looser outfits while the summer sale was on. She hadn’t started gaining weight yet – although her breasts had got bigger, and incredibly painful – but from her memory with Halley, weight gain would start happening in another month or so.

  John squeezed her hand. She looked again at the tiny silhouette on the fuzzy, swirly grey-and-white image on the monitor screen. She could see the arms, the legs and, when Dr Rosengarten indicated, she could even make out a foot.

  ‘I didn’t think you could tell the sex until at least sixteen weeks,’ she said.

  Rosengarten sounded pained. ‘With our equipment, twelve weeks is fine.’ He crossed his arms truculently, like a defiant child, and looked at his Oriental Barbie nurse. ‘Text books,’ he said dismissively. ‘You probably read that nonsense about sixteen
weeks in a text book. All text books are garbage, aren’t they?’

  The nurse nodded in agreement.

  ‘If you’ve got questions, ask me,’ Rosengarten said. ‘Don’t waste your time reading trashy text books.’

  Naomi looked back at John. Despite everything, she was suddenly nervous as hell. John squeezed her hand again, just a tiny, gentle pressure. Like a pulse.

  It was a strange feeling being pregnant again. There were moments in between the bouts of queasiness when she felt happy, but awed by a tremendous weight of responsibility. She knew that John was expecting a lot from Luke; she was, too.

  Staring at the screen, she asked, ‘Could I listen to the heartbeat again?’

  ‘You may, certainly.’ Dr Rosengarten placed the scanner on the gel he had smeared on her abdomen and moved it around until it picked up the sound, and Naomi lay still for some moments, entranced by the reassuring, rapid pop-pop-pop-pop bleeping. After a few moments, he glanced at his watch, removed the scanner, then said, ‘OK, Mrs Klaesson, you can stand up now.’

  The nurse stepped forward and wiped her.

  As she stood up she felt a sudden feeling of panic.

  What have we done? What if it has all gone wrong?

  ‘The baby is normal?’ she asked.

  His bloody secretary was standing in the doorway yet again, signalling to him. He raised a finger in acknowledgement, then distractedly turned back to Naomi.

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘You’re really sure?’

  ‘In as much as we can tell at this stage, fit and healthy. You don’t need to be worried. This severe sickness – this hyperemesis gravidarum – will pass soon. Just chill out, relax, enjoy your pregnancy – it’s a great and wonderful time for you.’

  The baby is healthy! she was thinking. My baby is fine, moving inside me. She closed her eyes for a moment, fighting off another wave of sickness. I’m going to be a great mum to you, and John’s going to be a great dad, I promise you. We’re going to try really hard to give you a great life, to make the most of all the advantages Dr Dettore has given you. You’re special, you know that? Just incredibly special. You’re the most special baby in the world.

  ‘So,’ John said, ‘you didn’t tell us.’

  Dr Rosengarten flipped a glance at his watch. The session had clearly timed out. There was a hint of impatience in his voice, suddenly. ‘Tell you what?’

  ‘The sex?’

  ‘You’re sure you want to know?’ He looked at them in turn.

  ‘Yes,’ Naomi said.

  ‘We do,’ John confirmed, smiling again at Naomi. ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘OK, good. Congratulations,’ Dr Rosengarten said. ‘You’re going to have a girl.’

  15

  Naomi, belted in her seat, locked in her thoughts, was only dimly aware that they were travelling up a ramp, that John was driving, that they were stopping at a booth. It was hot inside the car; airless, stuffy, and the litter of paper in the footwell rustled and crunched as she moved her feet. John powered down his window and handed the car-park attendant the ticket. The man scrutinized the validation stickers with the rigour of an immigration officer studying a passport from a terrorism hotbed, then raised the barrier. John shut his window.

  She was perspiring.

  As they pulled out into the street, a fallen palm frond skimmed across in front of them, and moments later she sensed the car rock in a gust. High-rise walls rose sheer on either side of them, making it feel as if they had entered a canyon, and she peered up, feeling trapped suddenly. Above them, jet-black clouds jostled for space in the narrow corridor of sky. A spot of rain struck the windshield and trickled down.

  They had been talking about the weather on television this morning, saying it was unseasonable for July. It seemed that for the entire seven years they had lived in Los Angeles, the weather had been unseasonable.

  Global warming was to blame for the whole world’s weather patterns being out of kilter – that was the considered opinion. Scientists messing with nature were to blame. Scientists were becoming the new heretics. First the bomb, then pollution, then GM food. And next? Designer babies?

  Fear pounded inside her.

  OK, good. Congratulations. You’re going to have a girl.

  If he couldn’t get that right – Dettore, Dr Dettore (call me Leo!) – if he couldn’t get that one absolute fundamental right, then . . . ?

  Oh God, what have we done?

  John drove the grimy grey Volvo out of the car park and made a left, followed by another left, then stopped in a queue at the lights of the junction with La Cienega. He indicated right. South.

  Naomi pulled her iPhone out of her handbag and quickly glanced through her afternoon schedule. She’d gone straight from Oliver Stone’s company to a six-week assignment for a company called Bright Spark Productions, which had made a documentary series about young filmmakers. The first show was going out on the Bravo channel in two weeks’ time.

  At two-thirty she had a meeting at UCLA film school. It was now twenty past twelve. Her car was at home, but she needed to go via the office to pick up some material. A twenty-five-minute drive, if the traffic wasn’t too bad. She needed about half an hour there to put some stuff together. Then allow thirty minutes to the film school. Not much of a margin left; she hated to be late when she was working.

  ‘What an asshole that guy is!’ John said angrily, finally breaking the long silence between them since they had left Dr Rosengarten’s office. ‘What a total fucking asshole.’

  Naomi said nothing. At five she was meant to be having a drink at the Four Seasons with a journalist friend who worked for Variety. She couldn’t cancel, but how the hell was she going to get through the afternoon? She lowered her window. The gust of air, even laden with petrol fumes, felt good, better than the smell of the interior, of warm, old plastic. John inched forward. A tractor-trailer rumbled past them.

  His cellphone rang. She was grateful that he killed the call. Moments later her own phone rang. She switched it off, with a tinge of guilt, knowing it was probably someone from the office but not able to deal with a work conversation at this moment.

  ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ she said, finally.

  ‘He’s wrong.’ John tramped the gas pedal, making a more violent turn than he had intended, pulling out inches in front of a bus, which blasted its horn in anger.

  ‘He has to be wrong,’ she agreed.

  ‘No one can know for sure at twelve weeks,’ he said. ‘It was dumb of him to claim he could.’

  ‘He’s arrogant. He doesn’t care about us, we’re little people. If you or I were A-list celebs, he wouldn’t have made that mistake. He wouldn’t have dared.’

  The bus filled John’s rear-view mirror as they crossed San Vincente and Wilshire. ‘His mind wasn’t on it.’

  ‘We should get a second opinion.’

  John negotiated the junction with Olympic in silence, then he said, ‘We’ll get one. He’s an asshole, he’s made a mistake. Sixteen weeks is the earliest you can tell, all the books say that. We’ll go and see someone again when you are sixteen weeks.’

  ‘I don’t want to wait four weeks – I can’t wait that long, John, I have to know. We have to know.’

  ‘There’s stuff on the net about a blood test called free foetal DNA, but I’m not sure how reliable it is. It may not be possible – to be totally accurate – until sixteen weeks. I don’t think we should panic.’

  ‘I’m worried,’ Naomi said. ‘If the sex is wrong, the other genes might also be wrong. There must be some one hundred per cent accurate way we can check on the sex without waiting a month. Surely? What about a DNA test – wouldn’t that be a possibility?’

  ‘Other than this free foetal method, it’s invasive to do that. I looked up a load of stuff on the web the other day about testing foetuses. There’s a risk of miscarriage. It’s a small risk, but – do you want to take any chances?’

  Did she? Any chances? She tried desperately
to think straight. If Rosengarten had made a mistake, it would be crazy to risk everything by panicking. But—

  ‘If it comes to it, we’ll fly back to the clinic. Confront Dettore.’

  ‘You think Dettore would tell us the truth? You think if he’s made a mistake he’s going to admit it to us?’

  John started to say something, then fell silent for some moments. Then he said, ‘He – he doesn’t have any reason—’

  Swallowing back a knot of fear in her throat, she said, ‘Reason to what?’

  ‘To give us a girl when we’ve asked for a boy.’

  ‘Phone him,’ she said. ‘You have his number, phone him now.’

  They were less than half a mile from home, but John pulled off the road onto the forecourt of the small shopping mall. He looked up the number on his BlackBerry then, holding the phone to his ear, dialled.

  Naomi watched his face. After some moments, he said, ‘This is John Klaesson. I need to speak to Dr Dettore very urgently. Please ask him to call me back on my cellphone.’ He gave the number, then he hung up.

  ‘Voice mail?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’ John looked at his watch. ‘They’re on East Coast time – which means they’re three hours ahead. It’s twenty after twelve. Twenty after three on the ship. Maybe there’s some problem with the switchboard. I had this difficulty getting hold of him a few times in the past.’

  ‘I didn’t see any switchboard on the ship, John.’

  He wedged the phone back into the cradle. ‘There’s a lot of things we didn’t see.’

  She said nothing.

  16

  When he was eighteen, John had to make a decision that would shape the course of his life. He had already decided he wanted to make a career in academic research, but had a hard time deciding which field. He was torn between his love of biology and his fascination with mathematics, physics and technology.

  There was something mystical to him about all mathematical problems. Sometimes he felt he was reaching out through time into some new, as yet undiscovered dimension, to meet an intellectual challenge placed by a vastly superior intelligence. As if each of these big problems was part of some cosmic puzzle, and if you could solve them, you would understand the key to human existence.