The Blue Death

by Joan Brady

  ‘Seemed to be.’

  ‘Think it’s because of me?’

  ‘The logo on the cop car,’ David said. ‘It was yellow. Round.’ Springfield’s cops wore blue, triangular logos. So did their cars.

  ‘Sangamon County?’

  He shook his head. He’d known cops’ logos since he was six. The Sheriff’s was badge-shaped with an eagle in it.

  ‘Fairy godmother?’ she suggested. ‘It’s certainly about time. Twenty years. Jesus, David. You spent twenty years in South Hams.’

  The way David saw it, Helen enjoyed his role as Springfield’s pariah much as she might enjoy owning an aardvark. What he couldn’t for the life of him understand was why somebody like her – beautiful, rich, smart, confident – would choose to marry him. Sex, sure. She loved taking risks. She loved shocking her friends and her grandmamma. But marriage? To the man all these people kept on saying had killed her father? Or just as good as? She didn’t think he’d had anything to do with it. Which left her pretty much alone. Not an easy position and not one many people could maintain for long, especially when the only person who agreed with her was Lillian. Hardly part of Helen’s social circle, but then only the colour of his skin made him closer than that. What kind of life could she have in mind with him? What could she want from him?

  He picked up a French fry and touched her nose with it. ‘I wonder what it’s like to be you.’

  14

  THE CHAIN OF ROCKS, MISSOURI: That night

  The Mississippi has forty-three dams and twenty-seven locks. Aloysia’s body surfaced near the last of them.

  This area is known as the Rust Belt, miles and miles of abandoned factories, oil refineries, steel mills. But despite the industrial desolation, number twenty-seven is the busiest lock on the river; it’s just north of St Louis, and there wouldn’t be any traffic at all without a lock. Water levels were way too low. In bygone times, tectonic plates collided here and threw out layers of magma that folded in on themselves to form what’s called the Chain of Rocks: a rapids at the best of times. The drought had turned it into a series of torrents that exploded in great bursts of muddy water over crags, shoals, outcroppings of stone.

  Canoeists dare each other to brave it during the day, but no canoeist in his right mind would try it at night even when the water level was high. Aloysia had the rapids to herself. They tossed her from rock to rock, torrent to torrent. By dawn, she’d reached the end and was drifting south at the river’s usual leisurely pace, her body not yet fished out by a single coroner along its route.

  15

  ST LOUIS, MISSOURI: The next day

  For as long as Jimmy could remember, his hero had been quarterback and kicker George Blanda. That man had had a God-given killer instinct, just like the coach of the Oakland Raiders said. Jimmy loved football. He told people he’d been a quarterback himself, drop back in the pocket, take one look up, find his wide receiver with that, oh, so perfect spiralling pass, crowd roaring, professional career snatched out of his hands by a rebellious cartilage in his knee – all of which sounded much better than the only member of Chicago University’s second team who’d never been on the field. There’d have to be some careful back-knitting for the gubernatorial race.

  The bit about the knee actually was true, except that he’d wrecked it falling over a bucket of car wash when he was thirty-seven. He wore a titanium brace on it right now as he drove out of Springfield on a secondary road through soy fields. He could have headed directly south on Route 55, but the city owned a stretch of land out here. He slowed down as he approached it.

  Buying the mayoralty hadn’t come cheap even with Becky’s help. He’d had to ‘borrow’ client money for it. Then he’d had to ‘borrow’ another, well, rather sizeable chunk to build a portfolio of good, solid investments – downtown properties, gilt-edged stocks and shares, a few hedge funds – that would gradually pay back both ‘loans’. When he was a kid, he’d dreamed of being rich, and even though this borrowed wealth was only on paper, he revelled in it. The ‘enterprise inducement’ that he’d already received for the privatization and the ‘bonus’ that was to come later: these would more than cover his debts. But as Jimmy saw it, paying debts was for little people. There were serious opportunities on the market for someone like him with daring and flair. Many stocks in these troubled times showed ‘interesting weaknesses’; that’s how his broker put it, and he talked to his broker every day.

  Just being rich wasn’t the limit of Jimmy’s childhood dream. The open and above-board profit from the deal would go straight towards his real ambition: he was going to give Springfield its own football team.

  The National Football League is a huge, multi-billion-dollar industry, a national business, not rooted in localities like English soccer teams. A rich and powerful man can buy a team and move it wherever he wants. The St Louis Rams used to be the Los Angeles Rams, and before that they were the Cleveland Rams. Why couldn’t they be the Springfield Rams? Nothing adds to a city’s prestige like having an NFL team. As for the man who does the buying? He’s Croesus. A team is a licence to print money. With that kind of power behind him, Jimmy wouldn’t need the Beckys of the world. He could buy the governorship as though it were a candy cane for a Christmas tree.

  And he knew that a first step in buying the players who would buy the governor’s mansion was a spectacular new stadium for them to play in. Jimmy was going to build just that right out here in these soy fields.

  He crept at five miles an hour as he passed the site. Surveyors were at work already, half a dozen of them with surveying poles and clipboards.

  Beside the road, a blonde in jeans with a shirt around her waist peered through a theodolite on a red and yellow tripod. She was standing where the turn-off from the road would go. Jimmy could see it in his mind, crowds with hot dogs and pompoms, cars honking and jockeying for position, stadium rising up beyond, direction signs that would read ‘The James Zemanski Memorial Stadium’. Not that he planned to be dead or anything.

  He waved to the blonde as he drove past her. She waved back.

  The drive to St Louis took a couple of hours. Jimmy didn’t allow for more; the trip was hardly a feast for the eyes, mile after mile of cornfields all the way south along Route 55, scrappy little towns tossed here and there. Jimmy had been born back east; he didn’t realize the crops looked odd until the highway began its gentle westward angle towards the Mississippi. ‘Knee high by the fourth of July.’ That’s the old saying. He’d never paid attention to it for the simple reason that by the time he got to Springfield, modern methods had long outdated it. Corn grew much faster, shoulder height at least by this time of summer. But these fields were barely past that titanium-braced knee of his. Another old saying is that you can hear the corn grow. That one’s true. Jimmy had heard it himself: a groan clearly audible beyond the rustle of the leaves, not an agonized groan, more of a sexual moan.

  The way Jimmy saw it, the mirrored monolith of Follaton Tower was even sexier. Maybe the traffic crawled onto the bridge across the Mississippi, but the sight of the Follaton Tower thrusting into the skies above St Louis, dominating not just the skyline and Eero Saarinen’s golden Gateway to the West but the city itself: that made everything else insignificant.

  Jimmy took a long ramp down into the tower’s bowels. He showed his pass, parked, took an elevator to a checkpoint; armed guards searched him, X-rayed him, exchanged parking pass for visitor’s pass and waved him into a two-storey-high lobby made of brushed chrome and grey marble.

  A corporation called UCAI owned this skyscraper; its logo flashed in dramatic orange and red against the muted background. UCAI was no ordinary company. It was one of the giants. Only months ago it had smashed its way into the top one hundred economies of the world, where it ranked just beneath the mighty Exxon and pushed the entire country of Kuwait down a peg. Its revenues topped $130 billion, and it had hundreds of principal companies operating in more than a hundred countries.

  Jimmy took an elevato
r to the highest floor and a second lobby, where full-size trees in pots arched over leather chairs beneath a high glass ceiling. His appointment was for ten, and he’d been driving since seven; the fresh-faced receptionist gave him a sympathetic smile.

  ‘Coffee, Mr Zemanski? It’s two sugars, isn’t it? I’ll bring it in. Mr Slad is waiting for you.’

  She led him to an office with a window wall that looked out over the city to the Saarinen arch, an executive throne room that called for Corbusier elegance and bold modern paintings. But the furniture here was aggressively plain. The wooden chairs belonged in a Baptist schoolroom, the desk could have come from the school’s dining hall. The only decoration was a full-size, brilliantly coloured statue of Jesus on His knees before His God with His mother standing beside Him, her hand on His shoulder.

  The halo over Mary’s head was slightly askew. Jimmy itched to straighten it.

  ‘Great to see you again, Mr Z,’ Sebastian Slad said, getting up from the dining-hall table that served him as a desk and holding out his hand. ‘I can’t tell you how glad me and Francis are to be working with a man like you on this here little project.’

  Sebastian was a Humpty Dumpty of a man, round, fat, bald, mouth full-lipped, mid to late thirties, enormous testicles bulging in his trousers. He and his twin brother Francis had taken control of UCAI five years ago: a ‘daring palace coup’, the press had called it. They’d found a corporation in trouble, mired in what would have been a ruinous scandal if they hadn’t intervened.

  Their predecessors had invested heavily in a new pharmaceutical that was supposed to bring in a fortune. It had hit a snag. Clinical trials caused many deaths in far-off Belarus. The Slads had no objection to the trials or the deaths – there’s always collateral damage in the development of a new pharmaceutical – but the methods were absurdly crude for so powerful an organization. They’d exposed it to potentially disastrous publicity. The twins had announced shock and horror at developments that – as new heads of the corporation – they couldn’t possibly have known about. They diverted attention with a daring hostile takeover of the legendary Russian-based corporation Vasiltekh, the major player in the Grand canal development.

  That got UCAI marvellous publicity of precisely the right kind. The New York Times carried the headline:

  St Louis trounces Moscow

  in battle for American water

  Who cares about Belarusians in a faraway country when real Russians can be beaten off our own soil?

  The Slad twins had been born in the tiny town of Spearsville, just north of Dodge City, Kansas, father a federal marshal, mother an itinerant beautician; they’d started playing entrepreneurial games early with a lemonade stand beside the road when they were six. At twelve, when kids sometimes take on paper routes for pocket money, the Slad twins were the ones hiring them. They’d paid their way through Kansas State University giving financial advice and selling second-hand computers, then gone onto Harvard Business School. Together they’d shone there.

  They were fraternal twins – physically very unalike – and Sebastian looked every inch the corn-fed boy he was. Easterners sneer at guys like that. Sebastian played it to the hilt, bumbling farm-boy speech, manners, Bible-belt fundamentalism; Francis was sophisticated, polished, highly literate. Together they made a formidable variation on good cop, bad cop. Even before they left Harvard Business School, they’d started stripping assets off little companies to build bigger ones. By their late twenties, the two of them were a force in the US business world and already in on the ground floor at UCAI, already planning the coup that would make them into heavyweights in the global market.

  Jimmy shook Sebastian Slad’s outstretched hand. ‘Good to see you, Mr Slad. Been looking forward to it all week.’ He glanced around the office. ‘Your brother couldn’t make it?’

  ‘You know Francis,’ Sebastian said. ‘He don’t like talking to people if’n he can help it. Excepting to me. And he don’t like that much neither.’

  ‘He’s okay though?’

  ‘As okay as he ever is.’ Francis Slad’s migraines were well known. ‘Hey, look at you. You got them glasses after all, didn’t you?’

  Jimmy was pleased that Sebastian noticed. He’d first seen his half-moon glasses around Francis Slad’s neck, and his mother had always insisted that imitation was the most sincere form of flattery. He hoped it was true; he’d had trouble connecting with Francis Slad. ‘They give me a certain authority, don’t you think?’ he said.

  ‘They do. They do. Take a seat, Mr Z. How’d the Council meeting go?’

  Jimmy grinned. ‘Like clockwork. They lapped it up, all six of them. Couldn’t get enough of the Grand canal or state secrets or the money they were going to save. I never realized how dumb aldermen were.’

  ‘How about the pretty gal?’

  ‘“Pretty gal”? Dr Gonzaga?’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘Never showed up.’

  ‘That the truth?’

  ‘Stupid bitch. Didn’t even email me. Who the hell does she think she is?’

  Sebastian ran his fat hands over his table of a desk. ‘We really got to find this gal, Mr Z.’ He gave the desk a proprietary pat. ‘Science ain’t no job for a woman. They don’t got the spine for it. So what’s this flimflam I hear about concerned citizens of Springfield? Mainly the old lady, huh?’

  The Slads had come to Jimmy; he hadn’t sought them out, hadn’t even thought of selling off utilities until they suggested it. But he’d talked to a couple of other water conglomerates just to see where the Slads stood. Nobody had even hinted at as much money as they were talking about. But then nobody else had controlling shares in the Grand canal. It was when they’d let him in on that that he’d known he could swing it with the Council. Which left Becky.

  ‘She’s a very powerful old lady,’ he said.

  Sebastian sighed his disapproval. ‘I never did believe in women interfering in science or business, and here we got ’em crawling all over both.’ He held up a hand. ‘She’s pushing for a vote on whether you privatize Springfield’s water at all, right? Kind of likes a fight, don’t she?’

  Jimmy nodded. ‘I have to hold an open Town Council meeting.’

  ‘That’s what Francis tells me. Now, Mr Z, how come you didn’t come to us at once? Huh? How come we got to find out about it ourselves? That ain’t the way friends are supposed to bond.’

  ‘I can handle it.’

  ‘Francis says why don’t you arrange for a small room without air conditioning? Once they’re sweating and irritable, just keep them from saying much.’

  Jimmy laughed. Ideas were always attributed to Francis, but it wasn’t so. The twins worked synergistically: alone they weren’t all that much – neither had been scholarship material – but together they made up a single genius that just happened to come in two bodies. Touches like a small, hot room were just what Jimmy needed. He could see a route through the rest of it. Rain does its job too well. It picks up pesticides from farms, oil from roads, fibreglass from roofs. The Illinois Environmental Agency had issued a mandate requiring that cities collect and treat storm water before discharging it.

  ‘You know, I don’t think Springfield’s got plans for treatment plants,’ he said to Sebastian with a smile, ‘much less estimates for building them. I can do a lot with that: should be enough to pin back an old lady’s wings some.’

  ‘That’s the stuff, Mr Z.’ Sebastian reached into a cardboard box under his desk, pulled out a thick wodge of paper bound in a manila cover and handed it over. ‘Me and Francis got you a little present that just might help.’

  Jimmy glanced down at it: Springfield, Illinois: Vital Services Feasibility Study and Long Term Projection. The authors were the Incol Executive, a highly respected Chicago think tank. He’d used them a couple of times for corporate clients; they had strong but well-hidden internal ties to UCAI.

  ‘Francis gave it a once-over himself, got the overall figure up to $250 million for building them
facilities and the system to incorporate them. Tell your citizens they’ll save $175 million over twenty years. That’ll catch their attention.’

  Jimmy patted the Incol report and gave a contented sigh. ‘God, you people are a pleasure to deal with. I pulled some statistics together myself – couldn’t get a figure anywhere near that high. How’d you do it?’

  ‘Crumbling infrastructure. Anomalous ground formations. Unsourced industrial pollution.’

  Jimmy had always thought he was pretty good at ‘creative accounting’, but this report was at least five hundred pages long. He opened it, glanced over a few pages. There were multiple-level equations and lengthy statistical analyses. ‘It’ll hold them for weeks,’ he said. ‘I can’t tell you how grateful I am.’

  Sebastian stood up and extended his hand as he had when Jimmy arrived.

  Jimmy got up too, shook the hand but held on to it. ‘Look, um, let me tell you something that just might be useful to you, kind of a thank-you for this report.’ He’d been struggling to find a way to introduce the subject.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A man named David Marion.’ Jimmy let go of the hand.

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  ‘He interrupted a programme of yours a while back, a very important programme. Your security department attempted to, er, regularize the situation. They failed.’

  Sebastian scanned him. ‘Mr Z, I ain’t got the slightest idea what you’re talking about. This is something that happened before me and Francis took over, right?’

  ‘Forgive me, Mr Slad, but I’m speaking here in my official capacity as one of your legal team. I don’t have to warn you about this guy. But I figure if we’re going to help each other out, I ought to mention him. He’s trouble.’

  ‘A businessman? Lawyer? Banker?’

  ‘A convicted murderer, now a part of Mrs Freyl’s circle.’

  Sebastian frowned, then broke into a smile. ‘Hey, wait a minute,’ he said then. ‘He’s the one married the granddaughter, ain’t he? You really think he could hurt us?’