Peters sat on the curb, staring into the blackness that hid San Francisco Bay. Blaise sat next to him and released the safety on the little Bufalo. -
“Are you going to shoot me?” Peters didn’t seem to care.
“No.” Blaise slipped the clip out and worked the slide, catching the ejected cartridge and replacing it in the clip. As he stared into the darkness with Peters a lyric from the wild old days at the Hungry I ran through his head. Tom Lehrer had sung that what folks had for lunch along the bay they had for breakfast in San Jose.
Lights in the house winked out.
“What now?” Peters’ voice was hopeless.
“I have to go back.”
Peters nodded, all but invisible in the darkness. “I’ll drive you to the airport.” He stood slowly, each movement a painful unkinking.
“It’s never been right with Linda,” Peters began. His voice was like a music box that could only be turned off by smashing it. Blaise tucked cold-numbed hands in his armpits and heard the ongoing tragedy of life with the Burkhalters.
Peters’ DAR family had been in San Francisco since before the Earthquake. If Jonathan had a fault worth mentioning, it was mediocrity. His single bad break was being smart enough to know it. Perseverance and money for tutors and time to study twice as hard as his peers at school lifted him out of the “also ran” category. He was a grind in an age that revered brilliance.
A noteworthy doctoral paper landed an assistant’s job at a prestigious university. Pedigree outweighed mediocrity and Peters evolved into a safely tenured professor. And then he fell in love with a grad student.
Peters stopped talking and Blaise noticed they were creeping along. “It’s the fog,” Peters apologized, and speeded up. “I couldn’t resist her.”
Blaise knew exactly what he meant.
Uncle Milo gave his blessing. Linda hyphenated her name, pleasing Peters since they’d married at a time when chic women “retained their identities,” keeping maiden names and acknowledging husbands only at their convenience.
The Peters family lost its money when his father plunged in the market, first with Jonathan’s trust fund, then with bank money. Peters would have been better off if his father had been a professional thief. He wouldn’t have killed himself.
They pulled up to the airport loading zone and Peters’ confession droned on unstoppable. Lights from the extended building front shone into the car. Peters had a huge bruise like a birthmark down one side of his face.
“You understand,” he said finally, as if sure that Blaise could understand what it meant to not measure up, first by himself and then by the family that had been Peters’ final anchor. “Milo hates my guts. I’m not intellectually good enough. I’m no longer wealthy. Finally”—Peters turned to Blaise with tortured eyes—“when he couldn’t get Linda to divorce me, he asked her to drop the ‘hyphen Peters’ because it was ‘an embarrassment.’ ”
Blaise was embarrassed for himself as well as Peters. He could not bring himself to trade confidences, nor did he think Peters would have welcomed them. His own actions had been so motivated by self-pity that Blaise felt like cripple who had robbed a blind man. “What did you do?”
“Oh,” Peters tried to smile. “I took what money I could and invested it with the Burkhalter Trust. It wasn’t much, but Linda wanted us to live in the house and she has her own income, so most of my salary is available for investment. Milo let me know it didn’t match up with what the other investors put in, but they considered it part of the family money and didn’t complain.
“Milo never complains. You know?” Peters’ eyes queried Blaise, afraid he wasn’t being rational. “Not out loud, anyway.”
Blaise nodded.
“That’s why I went to Human Enhancements. I hired a detective agency to report on Linda. I knew she . . . wasn’t faithful. But she wouldn’t divorce me. I had to know why.
“Human Enchancements works, Blaise. May I call you Blaise? Linda told me about you. So I knew. And the detective agency. Milo couldn’t hold it over me. It was as if Linda was protecting me. I’m smarter now, but the more I know the less I understand.”
Fatigue was working on Blaise but listening to Peters caused another ache inside. He’d made waves. They were still churning up debris that he was in whole or in part responsible for.
“I don’t know either, Jonathan.” Blaise thought a moment while Peters waited, tensed for a revelation. “I think Linda loves you. Even with Milo pushing her, she didn’t divorce you. She told you about me—but not me about you.” Blaise paused. “You’re Catholic, aren’t you?”
“Yes. Both of us.”
Blaise unlatched the door. “There’s a man here somewhere in San Francisco. Maybe he can give you the answers.”
Peters waited.
“Father Robert Argyle. He’s a Jesuit. Tell him everything about Milo’s activities and your . . . operation.”
For a moment Peters seemed about to cry from gratitude. “Thank you.”
Blaise hung onto the door and leaned down to eye level. “When you told Milo you’d been to Human Enchancements, how did he take it?”
“I didn’t tell him.”
“No?” Blaise blinked in surprise.
“He seemed to know.” Peters silently contemplated the steering wheel and Blaise started to pull away but Peters caught his wrist. “He was pleased—in a sadistic kind of way.”
“Tell Father Argyle I’m paying two debts by sending you, and I trust him to act accordingly.” Blaise closed the car door and walked into the airport, aware of Jonathan Peters’ eyes on him until he was out of sight.
The analysis of intelligence is thwarted to some extent by the very nature of the subject. It is only within the range of its own abilities that mankind can conceive of improvement. Thus, as with many other great advances, the ultimate goal is out of range of our vision. As yet.
FROM A SEMINAR ON
THE CUNNINGHAM EQUATIONS
CHAPTER 24
Blaise waited until Peters had time to either leave the airport or find a telephone. Then he found a car rental kiosk and signed for the biggest car he could get.
Sergio was eating breakfast when Blaise walked in. He couldn’t tell if Sergio had slept. His clothes were just back crisp from the cleaners, his skin still pink from a hot shower, but Sergio’s eyes and the lines around his mouth were deep.
Blaise told him what he’d done. Not everything, but enough, while Sergio cleaned up his plate and then washed it at the sink.
“Do you know how to run the dishwasher?”
Blaise said, “Probably,” and then couldn’t recapture his train of thought again without asking, “Don’t you?”
“No. And it’s getting full.”
“Were you listening?”
“You’re doing all right.” Sergio sat at the table. “I still don’t know what’s happening.”
“You know everything I know.”
“Almost, paisan’.”
“I need to know more,” Blaise admitted, “but Milo is hiding information. Gordon’s worried about something he won’t reveal—because he doesn’t want to upset me, or because he isn’t sure.
“You didn’t give Peters a chance to cross you up?”
“He’s unstable. Maybe he’ll do what I ask. If Linda gets to him, that’s a guarantee that what he knows, Milo knows. But I don’t think he was lying.”
Dobie pawed gently at his knee and whined. Blaise scratched the dog’s head, transmuting the whine into a sigh. The Doberman’s eyes were foggy and he appeared listless, but he hugged Blaise’s leg with his neck as he lay back on the floor and disappeared into a dreamless sleep.
“I gave him four fried eggs,” Sergio said.
“There’s dog food.”
“Whatever the disease is, we both got it.” Sergio shrugged. “What’s good for me is good for him and I don’t like dog food.”
“I want to move Helen. And I want to talk to Gordon again.”
“They foun
d Bruno in the trunk yesterday morning.”
Blaise held his breath and waited.
“West opened the trunk, looked at Bruno, then slammed it down. Heaven’s Gate registered ninety-seven degrees at one-thirty yesterday afternoon. Two guys took him out of the trunk at five.” Sergio did not change expression.
“I’m sorry.”
Sergio inclined his head slightly. “He’s alive. If he was dead, I’d have to tell his mother. My aunt.”
Blaise closed his eyes and slumped back in his chair. “You’re asking if it’s worthwhile,” he said to his eyelids.
“Yes.”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure I’d even care if Helen wasn’t involved. I don’t believe sixty-thousand-dollar surgery is forced on anybody who doesn’t want it. Everybody Went to Human Enhancements of his own free will. Even Helen.” Blaise opened his eyes. His mother always told him she could tell what he was thinking by how gray or how blue his eyes were at any moment. “I suppose you think that’s pretty cold.”
“I’m in no position to say, Doc. If I didn’t think you were right about the dog being important to me, directly, I’d have probably let Bruno do you like he was told. Maybe Bruno’s suffering for his sins and I’m suffering for mine. And you . . .” Sergio let it die.
“You’re different now from what you used to be.”
“I like to think so.” Sergio dissected Blaise overtly, as if examining a reflection of himself to which he wanted to divulge a secret.
“I have a theory,” Blaise said. “But it means talking to Gordon. It means getting Gordon out, first, and then getting him to work on it. How did you find out about Bruno?”
“I watched.”
“Long-range binoculars?”
“I told you they’re more important than a gun.”
“We have to get Helen out of the hospital. Because if we get Gordon, I think West would try to trade Helen.”
“It’s not possible to bust Miss McIntyre out, Doc.”
“That’s why I didn’t tell you what I want to talk to Gordon about. If you want it badly enough, anything is possible.” Sergio contemplated Blaise for a long moment. “I’m surprised, Doc,” he finally said, “that somebody hasn’t found a way to kill you before now.”
“Beware the intellectuals, Sergio. We’re all bastards.”
Closeted in the back of a Rolls-Royce limousine Sergio had rented for two hundred dollars a day, Blaise felt like he was inside a tank. The car was twenty-six years old, boxy, and came with a driver-owner, a coat of black paint, and the smell of polished leather. It also reeked with rectitude.
“You know, Doc,” Sergio admitted with a hint of wonder, “I never thought I’d voluntarily get into a car older than yours.”
Blaise held the curtain away from his window. He grunted and kept an eye on a large house with gabled roofs and the aura of old money. The vintage Rolls looked good parked in front. “He’s got a bite,” Blaise said.
The driver, radiant in black serge with a matching visored cap, was at the door to the house talking to a middle-aged woman whose permanent was too elegant for her housecoat. “She’s looking at the car.”
Sergio kept his eyes to the oversized binoculars, sweeping hillside and parking lot.
“She’s pointing.”
“Where?”
“The hospital.” Blaise leaned back and dropped the curtain.
“That’s good.” Sergio continued sweeping the hospital and the area around it until the front car door opened and the driver got behind the wheel. “If anybody is watching, we’re covered.”
“Okey dokey?” The driver was in his late fifties. A little guy with a walrus mustache and a Bronx accent. It cost an extra hundred and a promise that nobody was going to get killed, but the driver added that pushing cab in Manhattan, he might have done Murder One for that big a tip.
Sergio put the glasses in the case. “They’ve got a couple of process servers down there, but we’ll get around them.”
The driver started two tons of fine-tuned machinery down the hill. He never said he believed Sergio’s reason why they were paying so well. But he never said he doubted either.
Passing the main lot entrance, the Rolls ran up the emergency ambulance driveway and slowed to a crawl. A boxwood hedge screened one side. The hospital blocked visibility from every other direction except the street directly behind.
“Now!”
Blaise opened the door and steadied himself until he was running as fast as the slow-moving Rolls. Sergio pulled the door closed while Blaise slowed and walked into the emergency admissions rear entrance. Inside, he paused to watch the Rolls glide to a stop at the ambulance loading dock.
An intern in a green scrub suit came out gesturing angrily. Another man in a business suit leaned against the wall watching. While the driver argued, Blaise slipped through the adjoining room’s swinging doors with stretcher bumpers and glass see-through panels and was immediately inside the hospital.
His heart beat faster than normal. The empty corridor, shiny with reflected fluorescent light and the smell of disinfectant, was forbidding.
No one seemed interested in the elevators, but Sergio had said to assume he was seen. The trick was not to be caught alone with a stranger. Waiting until the doors on an empty elevator started to close, Blaise darted across the hall and inside.
As the slot between the doors shrank, he saw a man in the lobby wearing a red turtleneck sweatshirt get up from his chair. Then the elevator was moving.
The sixth floor appeared barren except for the duty nurse. Blaise crossed to her desk before she could use his name. “Can you call Dr. MacReedy?”
She gave him a sour look before dialing an inside number.
Blaise got the receptionist, then tapped on the desk while the doctor was paged. He told MacReedy he wanted to take Helen out of the hospital and MacReedy said he’d be right up. The nurse glared reproachfully at Blaise while they waited, still bent out of shape because he had lied about seeing Dr. MacReedy before leaving the hospital.
Turning away from her accusing face, he glanced through the windows into the ICU rooms. Helen seemed comfortable napping. The tinge of color in her face was preferable to the glacial white of a few days ago.
Idly, Blaise looked back through the other ICU windows, one at a time. And knew sudden panic. The room next to Helen’s held a single bed, a single large mound of white sheets.
Blaise started toward the door.
“Dr. Cunningham! Dr. Cunningham, that’s the wrong door!” The nurse’s voice echoed shrilly.
What was it Sergio had said? He’d wait on the floor because he knew Blaise would show up? Blaise turned the knob. The latch clicked, and he was inside.
The bed paralleled windows with views of ocean and part of La Jolla. Blaise grabbed the sheet and yanked.
Bruno’s gleaming black eyes stared up from the livid face. The hand next to the window held a black box that could only be some walkie-talkie offshoot with an on/off red plastic button. His thumb was clicking the button.
Blaise reached over Bruno trying to tear the box loose. Bruno caught his throat and he was drifting, losing feeling in the fingers he could see prying at Bruno’s. Bruno’s thumb was pumping. A click, click, click jittered from the built-in speaker. Somewhere closeby another box was clicking.
Blaise saw everything in slow motion as his air was cut off. Try! With painful slowness his fingers worked together and pried until Bruno’s thumb bent backward with a sound like a celery stalk snapping. The box skittered on the floor but Bruno had already given the alarm. The shrill-voiced giant yelled through wired-shut jaws, but Blaise couldn’t hear. His ears were threatening to burst. Then the pressure was gone momentarily. Bruno was straining to reach the gun butt sticking out from under his back. Trying with his broken-thumbed hand.
Blaise clenched fists together over his head.
Bruno scrabbled the gun free.
Blaise drove his joined fists down on the brace-and-wire splint t
hat cradled Bruno’s jaw. Bruno roared as the gun came up. Then his eyes rolled back.
“Are you insane?”
MacReedy examined the scene, horror in his eyes. The nurse seemed paralyzed, mouth still open, but shrill words forgotten.
“That’s one of the men who put Helen McIntyre in here,” Blaise said, before he caught himself. Accusations demanded proof and invited the police and witnesses. They burned a trace into people’s memories, creating impressions that could turn sour.
“Call security,” MacReedy told the nurse.
Blaise reached across Bruno and lifted the big man’s left hand. The gun was still in it. Sergio had been wrong. Bruno did know how to load one. Gently Blaise untangled the pistol. “Don’t call security,” he suggested, and held the gun.
The nurse put down the phone.
A choking, wheezing sound filled the room.
“I have to do something,” MacReedy protested. “He’ll die.”
“Good.” Blaise was still gasping.
MacReedy and the nurse stared.
Leaning against the wall, he gulped air. “You, Miss”—he stared at her name tag—“Levitt . . . will get a wheelchair and take Miss McIntyre out front to a Rolls-Royce that is waiting.”
MacReedy looked at Bruno. He nodded. “Get a wheelchair, Miss Levitt.”
The nurse clamped her lips in disapproval but turned and went down the hall.
MacReedy moved past Blaise and went to work on Bruno’s mouth trying to get him to breathe without choking. “I trust you, Dr. Cunningham, not to hurt Miss Levitt, or anybody in the hospital.”
“How’s Bruno?”
“You know him?”
Blaise didn’t answer.
“I think you’ve broken his jaw in places it wasn’t broken before.”
“That’s okay, I broke it the first time.” Watching MacReedy work, he added, “Be careful, Doctor. He’s violent.”
“So, apparently, are you.” MacReedy’s careful voice was neutral, the way he’d been taught to handle unreasonable people in bedside-manner classes. He was used to unpleasant but rich and influential patients. Blaise didn’t flaunt money or influence. But he had the kind of power that revolutionists say comes out of the barrel of a gun.
The Cunningham Equations Page 24