“Why didn’t the treatment work?” Sergio asked. “Bruno’s a Janus with one face broken. Twenty-twenty vision into the past and blind to the future. And because we imagine the future and try to ignore the past, we’ve wronged him.”
“But he was going to kill me!”
“So what? It was you or him.” Sergio grimaced in a painful parody of a smile and Blaise understood finally. He’d had enough experience to know that Sergio was drunk.
Blaise spoke carefully. “You helped me.”
“Yes. I did.”
“Why?”
Sergio laughed. “Why do you think, Doc? Because you know something might save me. I look out for myself. The priest says God’ll look out for me after I’m dead, but until then I’m on my own.” Sergio’s eyes narrowed. “I wanta know I didn’t do this all for nothing. Understand?”
Blaise understood.
Sergio yawned. “I think it’s time for bed.”
“The bedroom—”
“Forget the bedroom, Doc.” Sergio patted the soft, rust-brown armchair.
“You won’t get any sleep.”
“I’ll sleep. And I’ll be the first to know when somebody starts to break in.” Blaise’s twitch amused Sergio. “Doc, we made some people mad tonight.”
“Yes.”
Taking pity, Sergio added, “You did pretty good. I think you broke Bruno’s jaw. That’s good for us. Maybe even for Bruno.”
“It was luck.”
“I hope not.” Abruptly Sergio was laughing. Tears formed at the corners of his eyes.
Blaise waited until laughter turned to giggles and dried up.
“I was thinking, Doc. Don’t expect Bruno to thank you.”
“You’re hysterical.”
“ ’S all right, Doc. Just keep your mind on what you got to tell me tomorrow. Vita cautelosa, vita lunga.”
Lying unable to sleep, Blaise considered the possibility that Sergio was going mad. Gordon had not precluded madness as a possible consequence. Perhaps there were two personalities inside Sergio—echoes that had started going their separate ways. Blaise cringed at what he might have condemned Helen to.
He began his breathing exercises, which could sometimes force these unrooted hypotheses out of his mind. His demons were never far from midnight fantasies. Closer than real life.
One moment dissolved to nothing and the next Blaise was awake in surrealistic silence and golden light in a strange room. Sunlight lay over everything like a sheet of butter. The bed with its white sheets and honey-brown coverlet, the maple night stand and chest of drawers, even the comers that should have been shadowed all glowed with the morning light.
Silence sucked up any suggestion of life. He trudged into the bathroom and the distant hiss of running water reassured him. After a while he could force himself into the front room.
Sitting at the coffee table, Sergio looked over his newspaper and bacon and eggs. “You keep a lousy kitchen, Doc. I hadda drive halfway to San Diego to get stuff for breakfast.”
In the kitchen a tray of coddled eggs and bacon folded in paper towels lay on the counter with a clean dish next to it. The food was still warm and the odors appealing. It had been years since Blaise ate breakfast but involuntary reflexes filled his mouth with longing.
Sergio moved the paper, making room.
“What’d you do with the pans?”
“Threw them out. You think I’m some Dago scullery slave?” Sergio glared and Blaise was unexpectedly aware of gold-rimmed glasses. Sergio noted Blaise’s attention. “Vanitate, vanitate—tutto e vanitate. What do you think? Shakespeare sounds great even in translation, no?”
“If the bard said that he was quoting Ecclesiastes,” Blaise said. “You seem fond of Shakespeare. Did you pick that up in the first eight grades?”
Sergio smiled. “Man I used to work for . . . I don’t know if he gave a fiddler’s damn for Shakespeare, but whenever the phone was on, so was a tape or an l.p.”
“It doesn’t really scramble the audio,” Blaise said. “Enough to give half-deaf and bought-off pensioners an excuse for a reasonable doubt.”
“Can you see without those glasses?”
“Of course I can see. They just make it easier to read.” Blaise had been permitted to witness a weakness. It was Sergio’s token of faith. He ate in silence while Sergio finished the paper. The gesture, Blaise understood, was a small version of the bone-making ceremony in which elder mobsters witnessed and participated in a young recruit’s first murder, thus binding themselves in compulsory silence and brotherhood. But if Bruno died, Blaise and Sergio had already made their bones.
He cleared the table and rinsed dishes before sticking them in the dishwasher with the pans and cooking utensils. Then he sat. “I suppose I’d better tell you what I know.” Sergio folded the newspaper and put it out of the way. “That would be nice.”
“The operation consists of implanting an embryonic cell mass directly into the stem of the cerebral cortex. The mass is essentially a developing egg of a genetically engineered leaf fly. The cells grow and are possibly absorbed into the brain mass, thus altering some of the brain’s functions.
“The apparent effect is to correct genetic or physical damage that inhibits the orderly production of hormones and other regulatory functions in the brain. Over the short term it seems to work.” Blaise glanced at Sergio to see if he needed to elaborate.
Sergio’s skin was gray and his eyes glassy. “Doc,” he finally said, “you say in’ I got maggots in my brain?”
“It’s not like that—”
“Worms!”
“Don’t think of them as worms, Sergio. Just altered brain cells—like making rabies vaccine from horse’s blood or interferon from bacterial excretions. You know how yeast converts sugar into alcohol and you still drink wine.”
“It’s not the same, Doc.”
Blaise shrugged. “You have to live with facts, not fantasies. You can’t go back and change it.”
“You’re right, Doc.” Color returned to Sergio’s face but a panting quality remained in his voice. “You said possibly.”
“Possibly what?”
“Possibly the worms are converted into brain tissue.”
“Gordon’s not sure. That’s why Dobie is important. Hemmett and West destroyed all the other lab animals. Except Dobie, the longest-lived host. Whatever happens to Dobie will be a precursor of the future for human recipients.”
“What are the possible alternatives, Doc?” Sergio held his napkin delicately, but his knuckles whitened.
“We don’t know.” Blaise omitted to add their suspicions. Sergio wasn’t Gordon. The knowledge that a fly larva had been planted in his brain had shaken Sergio. The thought that larvae were ingesting his brain and quietly turning him into a maggot could push him over the edge. “It’s a possible cell mutation. Gordon’s studying the problem. It could be a transposon—”
Sergio’s face changed at the unfamiliar term.
“That’s a gene which will attach itself to a strange chromosome. They’re used a lot in genetic engineering. The gene is normal except for its ability to jump from one piece of genetic material to another and be absorbed. It’s like a genetic messenger boy. You give it the message and then it gets integrated into a chromosome somewhere and then that chromosome carries the message.
“What researchers do is find a transposon, cut it open chemically, then mix it with the desired DNA. The transposon gene incorporates the new DNA into its surface, closing the artificially induced lesion like patching a soccer ball. The transposon then incorporates into the nearest chromosome.” Blaise rattled on as pedantically as possible, reducing the startling to the trivial. He struggled to emulate a professor he had once studied under—a man who could have transmuted a first-person account of the Second Coming into Seconal.
Sergio needed time to realize that knowledge had not changed his condition, whatever it was. Blaise counted on Sergio’s wanting to be intelligent . . . at any cost.
“If it wasn’t done on purpose, then what went wrong?” Eyes that had receded into Sergio’s head were emerging again.
“It’s only a theory.”
Sergio drummed on the table with his fingertips, deciding for himself what was valid.
“Transposons were not used to make the modifications,” Blaise continued. “A more difficult manual system was initiated and standardized. Cost was not a factor since the laboratory making the original material had a patent on its design. So they forgot about the transposons. And when the altered chromosomes reproduced true to form, the transposons got their share of genetic material.
“No one gave the transposons a thought, Sergio. Transposons are the geneticists’ friend. They shouldn’t be able to leap from one type of chromosome to another. And if they did, there shouldn’t have been enough of them to affect the billions of mature cells in a person’s brain.”
“But they did?”
“Not for sure.” Blaise’s skin was tense with sweat threatening to burst free. He was afraid of Sergio. And he was unsure what Sergio feared. Too much knowledge? Or too little?
“What does Dr. Hill say?” A glint in Sergio’s eye warned him. Sergio understood Gordon’s need in a way that Blaise could not. The button man had progressed from dispassionate observer to cosufferer with Gordon. And Helen.
Despite his relief, Blaise felt frustrated and excluded. He could not empathize with them. He could only observe.
“Gordon believes it’s possible the original DNA addition contained a combination that proliferated the production of transposon genes, which is carried along from cell to cell.”
“You’re describing a cancer of the gene, aren’t you, Doc?”
“Not exactly.” He knew Sergio believed he had already looked the worst in the eye. He wouldn’t dig further . . . yet.
He still had to come to grips with it. Maybe later he would suspect.
“I have to think on it,” Sergio said.
Not too hard, Blaise prayed. He knew his was a futile wish.
Human reasoning that leads to faulty conclusions has two root causes: inability to manage memory satisfactorily and errant genetically determined logic.
FROM A SEMINAR ON
THE CUNNINGHAM EQUATIONS
CHAPTER 21
“I want a gun. ”
Blaise and Sergio sat in a rental car four blocks uphill from the hospital parking lot. Sergio had been quiet, putting up little objection when Blaise said he wanted to visit Helen.
“What happened to your gun?” Blaise asked.
“What gun?”
“But you—were a mafioso.”
“Doc, I was an errand boy. Why would a guy just runs numbers set himself up for hard time over a gun he’d never use?”
Blaise had learned other rules on television.
“Bruno’s different,” Sergio said. “I know you’re not gonna understand, Doc. But all Bruno was ever good for was knocking people around a little, if somebody he admired said do it.”
“Sometimes too hard?”
“Yeah, Doc. He didn’t know better. He still don’t.” Sergio palmed his billfold out of sight, then back into view in the opposite hand. He wouldn’t meet Blaise’s eyes.
“You don’t want to hurt him.” It was not a question.
Sergio made the wallet disappear and jerked at his suit with his hands. Blaise knew Sergio had tucked the leather back into his pocket even if he hadn’t seen the sleight.
“I did magic shows when I was a kid. Bruno brought me an audience. Make ’em clap even when I screwed up. I guess Bruno was my only friend, Doc.”
Blaise dropped it. Sitting in a hot car scanning the parking lot with 20-x-80 binoculars on a swivel clamped to the dashboard seemed excessively cautious, but Sergio had dictated it. Slouched, eyes level with the magazine-covered glasses, Sergio was invisible to anyone outside the tinted windshield. “I can get a rifle or a shotgun. Pistols take three days.”
“Too long.”
Blaise thought a moment. “Let me see that newspaper.” Sergio handed it into the backseat.
“What day is it?”
“It says Friday on the top of the paper.”
Blaise decided not to pick at any more of Sergio’s sore spots. “We have a chance this evening.”
Sergio seemed to be thinking.
Blaise was half asleep when Sergio said, “Okay.” He dismounted the binoculars for storage in their aluminum case.
Blaise slid from the backseat and got in front. Sergio put his hands on the steering wheel after he started the car, but remained parked. “See the red Ford at the hospital entrance?”
At that distance the cars were small but recognizable.
“Yes.”
“There’s a driver. Another man inside’s wearing tan slacks, white shirt, and a light-brown windbreaker with a white stripe breast-pocket high.” Sergio glanced at Blaise. “It’s too hot for a windbreaker. He probably has something like a thirty-two with a hammer shroud on his left hip. He’ll cross draw.” Blaise nodded.
“Don’t count on it though. He might be left-handed.”
“Reverse the motion?”
“Yeah.” Sergio put the car in gear and dropped down the steep street like a stone.
“Why do you need a gun?” Blaise asked it for something to say. “Bruno didn’t have one.”
“Bruno’s idea of fun is get five or six rough characters together and then lacerate them. He does it for exercise.” Sergio clamped his lips, remembering Bruno’s situation. He coaxed the navy-blue sedan to a street uphill from the back of the hospital and snuggled the car against a hedge of Italian cedars, standing like green, seven-foot-high javelin points.
They walked through the gate in the hedge to the front door of a mock colonial with baby-blue trim. The door contained thirteen panes of glass and a solid-brass Schlage deadbolt. Sergio inserted wires and clock springs into the keyhole. The door swung open. He smiled, nodded, and took off his hat as if someone was greeting them. They went in and closed the door.
Blaise stood in the cool hallway feeling his heart thud. He had not expected that breaking and entering would be so nerve-wracking. He had been perfectly calm when Sergio told him what they were going to do.
“I don’t think there’s a dog.” Sergio spoke softly. He led the way through the house, touching nothing. Blaise stuffed his hands firmly in his pockets.
The back opened on a patio with yellow fiberglass roof over a green-and-red Italian tile deck. The pool was cool blue, the color of the preformed plastic liner that ensured against leakage come earthquake or minor mud slide. A breeze stirred the heat as they opened sliding glass doors and walked around the pool to the six-foot redwood fence.
“Damn!”
“What’s wrong?” Blaise looked over Sergio’s shoulder.
Sergio held the combination lock, fingers clenched in disgust.
Blaise looked at the fence. “Climb over?”
“No. Wait.” Sergio strolled back to the house and reappeared a moment later. He began removing the four screws in the latch plate with the knife he’d taken from the kitchen. “If I could see into this yard, so can every house on the hill. We gotta come back this way.”
The latch dropped free of the post. Carefully, Sergio set the knife and the latch with the screws and lock attached next to the gate. They stepped through the gate, pulled it closed unhurriedly, and walked with the calm gait of those who belong.
From the car they had been unable to see the back of the hospital, but as Sergio had predicted, the pink wail was broken by a door that opened on a cement loading dock, green rubbish bins, and a battered, smoky black-and-rust incinerator. Inside, they took the stairway to the second floor, then caught the elevator and got out on the fifth.
“Not bad,” Sergio said. They were in front of the elevator doors contemplating the lights as if trying to decide which floor they should be on. “If he’s in the lobby by the elevator, we’ve gotten around him. Strangers are conspic
uous on intensive care floors so he shouldn’t be up there.”
Blaise began to understand why Sergio hadn’t objected about coming to the hospital. The infatuation with linguistics, the talk about psychiatry as a profession wasn’t serious. But Sergio was addicted to cat-and-mouse games. “Where would you be?”
“ICU, of course.” Sergio grinned. “But then, I’m first team.”
They walked the last flight of stairs, heels echoing up and down the emergency shaft. Dankness and old paint in the windowless, unventilated stairway oppressed Blaise. He paused. “Why were you waiting for me in the parking lot?”
“Who said I waited there, Doc?”
Sergio stopped talking at the landing and put his hand on the knob. “Cave canem, Doc. This is always the hard part.”
Blaise tried to feel through the closed door into the hall beyond, to know if somebody was waiting.
“If he’s there,” Sergio said quietly, “you go right and I go left. Don’t stop until you got his gun. He’ll kill if he can. If that’s what he’s been told to do.”
Blaise nodded.
Sergio opened the door in a smooth motion that carried him to the left, oiled motions that seemed casual but blurred with speed. Blaise felt awkward and clumsy lurching to the right, swinging his head, looking for the man in the wind-breaker.
“Dr. Cunningham!”
The nurse behind the desk stared as if Blaise had just flashed into existence. He tried to smile. “Sorry. I stumbled.”
Looking severe, she ruffled papers. “Dr. MacReedy wants to talk to you.” She nudged her desk telephone in Blaise’s direction.
“After I see Miss McIntyre.”
“Of course, Doctor.” She seemed to disapprove of his title.
“I’ll wait out here.” Sergio winked and started working on a conversation with the nurse. That Sergio had gotten to the sixth floor without the elevator didn’t seem to bother her.
The Cunningham Equations Page 21