“Must have been Dewey. Getting back to the story, one of the scientists was supposed to give Dewey the information on where the bonobos were. But they’d been followed, and they were jumped …”
“By the thugs,” I said.
“I assume they’re the same thugs.”
“Did Dewey say who these scientists worked for?”
“He doesn’t remember getting that information. He’s had some memory loss.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes. He kept saying ‘hat’ and ‘women.’ Mean anything to you?”
“The hat, yeah,” Jason said. “The map and the formula were in the hat.”
“You have the map?” Blue said. “We both have copies,” I said.
When we stopped at a red light, Blue looked at the map.
“It doesn’t ring any bells. I got a cousin who’s a building inspector. Maybe he can make some sense outta that map. Oh, I looked after that other matter.”
“What matter?” I asked.
“Steering your friends in Investigative Reports astray,” Jason said.
“Yeah? Cool. What did you do?”
“Doctored up a couple of old reports from my sanitation cop days, changed dates, made the officers’ names unreadable. One of them was a report on illegal dumping of lab waste—threw in a couple mentions of nicotine by-products …”
“That was my idea,” Jason said.
“Yeah. The other is a report on a dead lab monkey we found in the Brooklyn dunes a few years back. So I took these reports and faxed them to the numbers you gave me, Jason. Speaking of monkeys and so on, you hear about those gorillas in equatorial Guinea?”
“Which ones?” Jason asked.
“Stormed a village to free a baby gorilla captured by a hunter. They succeeded.”
“Yeah, you heard about the elephant in India that was working on a road crew, moving logs? He escaped into the forest, took two female elephants with him.”
“Two females! My man!” Blue said.
“Did you hear about the guy in East Africa?” I said. “Went around shooting gorillas with tranquilizer darts and dressing them in clown clothes.”
“Those gorillas must have been pissed when they woke up,” Blue said.
“It’s mean to do that to gorillas,” Jason said. “But I can think of some people I’d like to do that to.”
Blue pulled up in front of the Bog, a white plaster building, two stories, that stood out in a block of one-story buildings and parking lots.
“You’ll be okay?” Blue said. “All tarted up like that, Jason, you be careful.”
“Yeah, yeah. Beep me when you know something,” Jason said, and hopped out of the car. We waited until he went inside before we drove off.
“Jason won’t let me use my cell phone for Organization business,” Blue said. “Says the phones aren’t safe …”
“Use this one. It belongs to my neighbor. I’m sure it’s safe,” I said.
Blue dialed. “Malcolm, is your daddy home? It’s Uncle Blue, baby. What? Where? Okay. You take care of yourself.”
“Well?”
“We have to go to Queens. It’s his bowling night,” Blue said.
“We can head over there after Budd Nukker,” I said.
Having Nukker look over the formula required him stepping off his treadmill and away from his heart and lung monitors. He did so, but each moment away from his life-lengthening activities made him visibly more anxious, bringing him a moment closer to the “possibility” of eventual death.
“Androstenone is reported to make women sexually receptive. Copulin incites testosterone development in men,” Nukker said.
“Makes them horny?”
“Theoretically. Makes them more aggressive in general. This has been reengineered though. I don’t know why, or what the effect would be. Perhaps to make it easier for men to absorb it.”
“What about this one, Osmone Two?”
“Well, Osmone One is an airborne tranquilizer,” Nukker said. “I’ve never heard of Osmone Two, but clearly it is some sort of adaptation of One.”
“Could it affect men and women differently? The way pheromones do?”
“Possibly. All the studies I’ve seen show women are far more sensitive to these things.”
“How so?”
“Well, women are a thousand times more sensitive than men to musk molecules. Women tend to respond more strongly to aromatherapy, and women’s menstrual cycles are often aligned by pheromonal signals.”
“I’ve heard that. So this could be an airborne tranquilizer that operates on women only?”
“Could be,” he said. He was starting to sweat profusely and glanced at his treadmill. “I would have to run it through the computer, perhaps conduct lab tests to know more. That could take months.”
“Thanks anyway,” I said, not wanting to leave the formula with him, though he’d probably be too busy staying alive to rip it off. It had been risky showing it to him, but he was the only one of the eggheads to respond to my call.
“It confirms what Jason and I found,” I said to Blue after I left Nukker. “Adam is some sort of odorless, virtually undetectable, airborne substance designed to subconsciously alter the behavior of men and women.”
“No shit. Who do you think is behind it?”
“I was leaning toward Alana DeWitt. But why would Alana DeWitt want to make men more aggressive? Unless it is part of some long-range scheme to make men kill each other off while women sat by contentedly. She’s mad enough to do it, but she doesn’t seem patient enough to wait out the resulting wars. On the other hand, this would probably be faster than waiting for the Y chromosome to devolve.”
“Huh?” Blue said.
I brought him up to speed on Alana DeWitt’s theory of male extinction.
We turned into the parking lot of a small mall in Bayside, Queens, dominated by a bowling alley with a vertical 1950s-drive-in-style cutout sign shaped like a large bowling pin that said “BowlMuch Lanes” in big black and red letters. The sun was finally setting, and the red neon outline of the bowling pin lit up as we were walking through the parking lot.
Inside, we were hit by bright lights and loud noises, balls rolling, pins falling down, and sixties rock on the sound system. It was league bowling, and people were in matching shirts. Blue found his cousin Ernie and pulled him aside to the bar, which was bright red and yellow. Everything in this place was 1950s Technicolor.
“Hiya, Blue,” Ernie said. “Still dating your ex-wife?”
“Yeah, am I a jerk or what? Hey, take a look at this map. Any way you can find out where this building is from this information? All we know is that it’s on an island somewhere north of Montauk.”
“Is it important?”
“Yeah.”
“Let me ask Jackie. The plumbing specs might make some sense to him. Jackie,” Ernie called to another big black guy. “Come take a look at this.”
Before it was over, Ernie’s whole team was huddled over the map, discussing the possibilities. One of the bowlers knew a plumber out on Long Island who worked near Montauk. He went to call him. Others on the team left to bowl their turns.
“See you Labor Day, for the picnic,” Ernie said to Blue.
“Yeah, thanks, Ernie.”
“You wanna beer or something, Robin?” Blue asked, reaching into a bowl of peanuts at the bar.
“Maybe a soda, a Coca-Cola.”
“Give us a coupla Cokes,” he said to the bartender, and popped more peanuts into his mouth. “You bowl, Robin?”
“Once in a while, on a lark. My average is about sixty-six, as I recall. You?”
Blue shook his head. “Tell me about this story you’ve been working on, the one that got you involved in this bonobo business,” he said.
“Man of the Future. How men might evolve, a lot of different visions of it. I’ve been trying to nail down something eternal about masculinity, beyond anatomy, of course. What do you think it means to be a man, Blue?”
“Or more.”
“When my pop died a few years ago, my oldest sister, Ruby, found some letters he’d written as a kid to his ma, when he was away at this boarding school for poor boys, run by some church in Massachusetts. In one of the letters, he wrote that he was in the hospital. ‘Don’t worry, Ma, it’s nothing serious,’ he wrote. ‘Just a touch of polio.’”
“Wow.”
“That just sums it up for me, my pop far from home, trying to better himself, getting polio, having to be strong, and yet sensitive to his ma’s feelings. That’s a man. He was only ten at the time.”
“He recovered from the polio though?”
“Yeah, but it stunted the toes on one foot and left him with a limp. Your dad alive?”
I shook my head. “I was only ten when he died. He was a math teacher and a weekend inventor. He died while trying to make the world safer for his womenfolk and everyone else.”
“How?”
“He was campaigning to get a streetlight on a bad corner. While he was measuring the street to get its specifications for his safety report, a truck barreled around the corner and mowed him down. You know how they say someone has to die before they’ll put a streetlight at a bad corner? My dad was the guy who died. Shortly after, a traffic light was put up. When I was little, I liked to imagine my father was in the traffic light, a benign authority telling me when to stop, to go, or to slow down and use caution.”
“I understand,” Blue said.
The bowler who knew the Long Island plumber returned.
“I found Les. It’s his poker night. He plays at the Surfside Bar in Coney Island. He’s expecting you.”
“Thanks, bro,” Blue said. We paid for our Cokes and left.
“You think men will be stronger and more sensitive in the future, Blue?” I asked.
“I think so, I hope so. There are some bad young ’uns out there, but the good ones seem a lot better than the good ones in my day. Jason and Dewey are good guys. You like Jason?”
“Yeah, he’s okay,” I said. “Young and idealistic. A firebrand.”
“Yeah, and Dewey is too. But it’s nice to know there are still kids who care, you know what I’m sayin’? Our generation, they’re facing ‘reality,’ or what passes for it. You know things aren’t the way they should be, but you go along to get along. You want to save the spotted owl, but you know how those loggers feel, being put out of their jobs. They got mouths to feed. Some of ’em, all they’ve known is logging. What are they going to do?”
“It’s hard for men. Their self-esteem seems so much more tied up in their work than women’s is, generally speaking.”
“That’s a fact, even in these modern times. Dewey and Jason, they aren’t practical, God bless ’em.”
“So how come a guy of your generation is involved?”
“Bottom line, I think they’re right, those kids. Not practical. But right in the long run. Some people make practical choices, some take the high road, no matter the cost. Me, I gotta look after my karma. I was a bad guy when I was young. Mean. Had a lot to prove.”
“You were a bad guy, Blue? I have a hard time believing that.”
“I used to cheat on my wife, lie about everything, I was selfish.…”
“Well, that’s human stuff a lot of people go through. It’s not like you killed someone.…”
“Yeah, I did. Killed some men in Nam,” Blue said, and his dark skin took on a different kind of darkness, the kind that comes from within. For a moment, he glowered over the dashboard, the streetlights strobing his face.
“I didn’t want to kill. I did it because my country told me to. That’s when I stopped believing in countries, know what I’m sayin’, Robin? There’s just planet Earth, the Organism, a part of the Big Organism, no borders, no real estate. How can anyone own a piece of the planet? I’ve never understood that. Who gave them the right to buy it, or sell it?”
“That’s what happened to change you from bad to good? Nam?”
“It happened later, after I got back. Long story. Like a miracle. I got high with an angel, and I got nice.”
“A real angel?”
“Who knows? ‘Be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels, unawares,’” he said. “Hebrews.”
When we got to Coney Island, Blue parked near the armed services recruiting center just off Surf Avenue and we walked down to the boardwalk. It was around ten, and the lights were all on in Coney Island. All the rides and amusements were lit up and moving to their tinny carnival music. There were sailors on leave and girls in polka-dot dresses with beehive hairdos. If you squinted a little, it seemed like it was 1952, the Dodgers were still at Ebbets Field and Chevrolet still ruled the road. But then two punked-out lovers walked by, followed by a couple of yuppie dads in Dockers pushing yuppie puppies in strollers. I heard the Ramones blaring from the sound system of one of the open-front bars on the boardwalk, and I was caught in this lovely anachronistic warp.
We walked down the boardwalk toward the Surfside Bar. Tucked into a long line of concessions, the front was wide open and facing the ocean. We walked in and looked around, until we saw a table of guys playing cards at the back.
“One of you guys Les?” Blue asked.
“Yeah, I am,” said a short white guy with a monkish fringe of hair and dark-rimmed glasses. “Excuse me, guys, I gotta go talk to these people. Can you get me another beer and some French fries?”
“Thanks for helping us out,” I said.
“No problem. Larry and Ernie vouched for you. Let’s sit down at this table. You need a beer?”
“No thanks,” I said.
I unfolded the map and put it on the table between us, and Les took a long hard look at it.
“I didn’t do this job,” he said. “But I might know who did. Can I keep this?”
“Well …” I said.
“How about this? Here’s my card. Fax a copy of this to me tomorrow, and I’ll make some calls.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Les, your fries,” called one of the cardplayers.
After he left them, Blue said, “Don’t expect there’s much more we can do tonight. And Jason hasn’t beeped. Come on, I’ll take you home. You in a hurry?”
“Not a terrible hurry.”
We wound our way through the anachronistic, somewhat seedy midway, and Blue stopped at a shooting gallery and shot off a few rounds at little metal targets that moved back and forth along a wire. He was a good shot, and won me a tiny gold Buddha.
“That’s good karma,” he said to me.
When I got home, my cat was at the window, and the message light was blinking. Liz had called to say the interview went well—I’d forgotten to call the office and check up on her. Gus had called to say he was moving to the Metro Grand Hotel and would be in town for a few more days, could we please get together to talk, to really talk. He asked that I call him, but I couldn’t deal with it right now, though I felt bad. He was confused by my blowing him off without a logical explanation and he was falling into an old trap, where you think you like someone more than they like you just because they seem to be cooling to you. No matter what I told him, he wouldn’t believe me: Hey, Gus, I’m hot on the trail of a biological weapon at the moment, can we talk later?
I crawled into bed with the hat, a beautiful hat despite its now torn lining. Boy, the world had changed. When I was a kid, you would see a steady stream of men in hats walking down the street on a Saturday afternoon, even more on Sunday, as men always wore hats to church in my town, which they removed before they entered. Now you see men in hats and it either seems old-fashioned or a retro affectation. Funny, too, that hats, which protect the head and serve a practical purpose, went out of style and ties survived. Between the two, wouldn’t you vote for the hat over the paisley noose? Men got screwed on that one.
I fell asleep h
olding the hat and dreamed of Jesus, one of those Jesus dreams like I used to have as a kid, after my dad died, Jesus as cartoon superhero, swooping down out of the sky to kick the shit out of the bad guys, with lots of thunks! and pows! Adam West—Batman style. In this dream, Superhero Jesus rescues me, Jason, and the bonobos, and we all hold hands and fly through the sky to some safe, warm, dry place. Jesus is wearing the hat.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The next morning at the office, I faxed the map to Les the plumbing contractor, pounded out a script for the second part of the series, and delegated all other authority to my staff. Liz got another interview. Shauna got one, too. Karim the agoraphobic tape editor was assigned the promo. The interns were assigned to help the others.
This presented a problem, because there wasn’t one of my employees I trusted. Word that they were doing these challenging assignments could cause quite a ripple around the network. Not only would this give newsroom gossips something to fictionalize about, but it might tip Reb and Solange off that my energies were being focused elsewhere.
To prevent this, I convened a staff meeting in our conference area and spun my abdication of responsibilities this way: You, my loyal employees are being given increased opportunities on account of your excellent work. There are risks involved in these new responsibilities. The newsroom naysayers are watching you, ready to pull you down before you even get started. Don’t give them any ammunition. Work quietly and discreetly until the series airs, showing me, the newsroom naysayers, and all other doubters what you can do.
Now, my employees were professionally and emotionally invested in the quality of the product. Their butts were on the line.
Jack had called, and that was one task I couldn’t delegate. I called him back immediately.
“Robin, I was readin’, uh, an article by this woman Suzy Hibben. You know her?”
“Not personally. But I know of her. She’s spent most of her adult life running all over the country telling other women to stay home and serve their husbands and children.”
“She’s here at the women’s conference with a bunch of her college girl followers.”
The Last Manly Man Page 18