by Susy Gage
“Aren’t you eating?” Abby wondered.
“No. I’m too nervous.”
She nodded as if that made sense, stood up and went back into the bedroom. When she re-emerged, she looked professional and scary again. “Are you ready? Good. I’m just going to brush my teeth, and then we can go.”
The diner had been empty when Lou came for the bagel half an hour before. Now it was filled with nerds who mumbled to themselves and drew vectors in the air. The booth at the very back was empty, though, and he concealed himself behind the crowd with a cup of coffee and a camera. The Bubo website needed to feature Kuzno’s expression when he came in and saw Abby there, ready to pounce, standing on the edge of the bar so she would be able to look him straight in the eye.
They didn’t have to wait long, but Kuzno didn’t seem to react at all at the sight of Abby. He gazed straight through her as if she didn’t exist, went to the bar and ordered himself the deluxe glutton breakfast. He continued to ignore her when she stood beside him, pretending to check his e-mail on a small laptop; she finally had to say loudly enough for the room to hear, “Good morning, Sasha! I’m afraid you flew off yesterday without having a chance to finalize some paperwork.”
Sasha evoked a gaspingly adorable Golden Retriever with long floppy ears, but it was one puppy name that would be ruined for Lou forever.
Kuzno turned around, but didn’t see Lou until Abby steered him towards the booth. Lou just had time to hide the camera under a cloth napkin.
Kuzno took a step backwards. “If you spent federal funds coming out here, Maupertuis, I will personally see you fired.”
“I knew you were lame, Kuzno, but that’s a dumbass threat even from you.” Lou found he was enjoying fighting with his old nemesis again. “I could get you fired for interfering with my work.”
“In cases of fraud, I can refuse to sign,” Kuzno declared confidently. “And I think forging my signature counts as fraud.” He tried to turn to stalk away, but Abby blocked him, urging him into the booth opposite Lou. She then sat down next to him, impeding his exit.
“No one forged your signature,” said Lou and Abby together.
“Oh no?” Kuzno’s lips folded up over his scraggly teeth, making him look like one of those squished-face dogs. “Neither of you actually saw me sign.”
Lou kept his mouth shut, because this was Abby’s job—and he really wanted to hear what she had to say about Rose’s honesty.
Sadly, it wasn’t much, apart from “Professor Rose has the Nobel Prize.”
Kuzno continued to grin evilly, scaring away the waitress who had tried to approach with the coffee pot. “And why do you think that he has never been allowed to head the department?” he beamed. “The old man has been shady for years. He also has no business writing an experimental proposal. I would have refused to sign even if he hadn’t pulled this ridiculous stunt.” He sat back in triumph to allow another waitress (one older and more jaded, maybe) to deposit his glutton plate in front of him. Hunching over the mound of greasy eggs and meat, he slurped and snorted like a goblin for a few minutes before raising his head and pointing at Lou with a sausage. “Maybe you should have thought a little harder before trusting him.”
“Writing this was not Rose’s idea,” Lou rejoined easily. “It was mine.”
“Oh, I know,” Kuzno replied, returning chompingly to his meal. “That obviously wasn’t what I meant.”
Lou slammed his hands down onto the formica table with all his might. It shook a little, making some scrambled egg jump up and stick to Kuzno’s nose. “If you know something that you’re not telling me, you motherfucker, I will rip your goddamn head off right here in the restaurant.”
Kuzno sat back smugly, wiping at his nose. “I think that was a threat,” he suggested in Abby’s direction, then went back to eating.
“I wouldn’t know, I only do intellectual property,” Abby replied coldly. “What I do know is that if you know something, it’s called accessory to murder and it gets you in even more trouble than being forced to marry nineteen-year-old undergraduates after seducing them in the conference room and getting them pregnant.”
“Me, accessory?” Kuzno gave a brittle laugh. “I’d say it’s the old man who knows more than he should. Everyone he hires ends up dead—or at least halfway there,” he added with another gesture of the sausage in Lou’s direction.
“Fortunately, I’m tough to kill,” Lou replied. “As Barrow once pointed out, there’s nothing in my chest but a lump of stone.”
“Yeah,” Kuzno leered, “but what’s it like knowing you’ll never have a woman again?”
Don’t point your sausage at me, Lou thought. “It gives me that many more hours every night to dream about hating you.”
“Kuznetsov, you’re disgusting,” snapped Absinthe, forgetting her own injunction. “If you refuse to sign with Rose as the PI, I’m sure the proposal works just fine without him—right, Lou? So you have two choices for PI: Maupertuis or Barrow, neither of whom has forged your signature.”
Kuzno gave a bizarre, high-pitched squeal, something you’d hear in the woods just before getting chomped, or maybe gored. “That is even worse. Maupertuis is an incompetent, inexperienced, and untrustworthy PI. Doubly so in accomplice with a known troublemaker, who was forced to go to a third-rate graduate school when the things she did here and as a child became public after your office leaked them.”
“Watch out, Kuzno,” Abby sneered (no more “Sasha”!). “Now you’ve insulted my home state. Maybe Minnesota is third-rate, but it’s a lot better than where you’ll end up if you persist in your stubbornness. Not only are you the most scandal-plagued department head ever—and yes, that includes the mathematicians—you also are going to have to back up any claims you make about these investigators and their alleged `irresponsibility.’ Professor Rose, if you recall, was offered your position several times but turned it down, and your personal vendetta against him is well-known. And you’re going to look really evil in court trying to say bad things about a guy who went back to work a month after being shot in the spine. Not to mention a poor little orphan girl whose only home has ever been at STI.”
She was just getting warmed up when her cell phone rang. It was now past seven-thirty back home, so Lou prayed it was Barrow and gestured at her to answer it with his eyes.
From the little “Eep” on the end of the line, he knew it wasn’t Barrow but Walter Waddles IV, but he couldn’t hear any of the rest of the conversation. Abby shrieked “WHAT?” a few times, then got up and tore out of the restaurant and away from them without even promising to return.
Lou was left alone with Kuzno, who was wiping the traces of his breakfast grease off his plate with a nasty-looking piece of toast.
“So which is it?” Lou asked him, hating to have to do this part himself. Nerds were not made for confrontation. “Sign or be sued?”
“You can’t sue me, Maupertuis,” Kuzno sneered. “You lost any credibility you might have had when those moron students of yours refused to leave. You had two of them, may I remind you—and that pathetic woman was not the worst.”
“Keep talking, Kuzno, and you’ll end up in prison,” Lou replied with exaggerated politeness. “Marybeth is more than pathetic, she’s dead.”
Kuzno seemed to actually react to this. He wiped his plate with his second piece of toast, but didn’t eat it, just wadded it up in fury and dropped it into the middle of his place. “Fine, Maupertuis, you win,” he snarled. “Make me a new page with Barrow as the PI and without the old man, and I’ll sign it.”
Was it a trick? Or maybe, as Lou hoped, Kuzno thought that this would be a difficult task. Thanks to electronic gadgets, though, he was ready in seconds.
“There’s a printer in my room,” Kuzno offered. “Let’s get this over with.”
They wended their way through a bunch of string theorists, several of whom had very clearly been eavesdropping. Lou thought he recognized a couple of them, and thought about asking one to come up
and witness Kuzno’s signature in case Abby didn’t arrive on time—but in the end he didn’t. How absurd could this get, after all?
It took a while to make Lou’s computer communicate with the folding dot-matrix printer Kuzno had brought. He had to pay for hotel internet access, log in, and download a remarkably large driver. Despite Kuzno’s claim, it didn’t work wireless, and the evil man sorted through a mass of cables for what seemed a ridiculous amount of time. Lou was starting to get suspicious that he was stalling for some reason, but they finally managed to get the page printed twice. Kuzno then made a big deal of selecting a writing implement from among his collection, which appeared to be everything from quill pens to artist’s brushes.
Somehow this was the one thing about him that made him seem a little bit human. All theorists loved their pens and pencils, but Kuzno held his in special monogrammed boxes, some initialed in Russian, arranged in a padded mini briefcase. He had an inkwell—something Lou had only seen in art class. The ink was not black, but a deep violet.
The actual pen he chose to sign with seemed like an ordinary ballpoint, though. He was just holding it over the page when there was heavy knocking on the door, shouts, and a woman screaming.
Abby dashed into the room, flanked by two security guards, and knocked the pen from Kuzno’s hand. “You are in so much trouble now,” she hissed as one of the guards bent to retrieve the pen with his rubber glove.
Lou could see the blood drain from Kuzno’s face, and amusing though that was, he really didn’t understand it. There was a bit of commotion as Abby produced her own pen, one of those very ordinary ballpoints made by blind people. She forced Kuzno to sign both copies of the form, duly witnessed by the two of them and the guards. They then got up and left, leaving Kuzno sitting on the bed with the look of a man awaiting a visit from the KGB.
“Good news,” Abby declared once they were back in the lobby. “The sky’s clear over Denver. I got us tickets and we’ll be home before lunchtime.” She whispered something to the security guard, and retrieved Kuzno’s pen, safely enveloped in the glove. “I’m going to need to check a bag,” she told Lou conspiratorially. “Certainly not going to bring this in my carryon.”
He looked into her eyes for signs of the brain tumor, thinking that either the NutraSweet got her at last or there was something Walter Waddles had said that would put a new twist to everything that was going on.
Thirty-Three: Wigging Out
Lori had been awake for an hour, and was just starting over again counting the seven hundred and twenty-one little tiles when the guy from the legal office came to get her out. As Abby had promised, it went smoothly, and on the way back to campus she asked the question that had been tormenting her all night.
“Have they caught Wigbert van Gnubbern?”
The lawyer looked blank. He seemed to have no idea what she was talking about. When he asked for an explanation, she muttered incoherently and sped up the pace so she could eclipse herself into the physics building.
No one appeared to be in yet, not even any Buboes. Her office was exactly as she’d left it, with about half of the proposals printed and collated on her desk—the only difference was that Walter Waddles IV was dead asleep in her office chair.
“Wake up, Walter!” she shouted.
“Huh? What? Aah!” shouted Walter, head snapping up. “Barrow!” He looked infinitely guilty.
“What’s wrong?” Lori demanded immediately.
“The President has left for his Christmas vacation. Professor Rose stalled him as long as possible, but he had to leave, and he wouldn’t sign without Kuzno’s signature first.”
“Where’s Rose?”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh,” said Lori, not really giving a shit. “So I guess we’ve lost.”
Walter jumped slightly, clearly expecting a much different response. “But—?”
“No, I don’t give a good goddamn. Go home and go to bed. It’s over.”
He sidled out the door, probably afraid that she’d gone mad and would hurl a javelin after him or something. Left alone, she stared for a long while at the mountain of paper on her desk, but couldn’t face it right away.
Instead she went downstairs and entered the BSL-3 (no gloves, only a lab coat that she didn’t bother to button). Someone had forgotten to turn off the mercury lamp on the microscope. The lamps were supposed to be replaced every 200 hours of use, and this one now read 257.14. She snapped it off, wondering if the instrument would ever be used again, or if that number would sit for years as a testimony to this horrible day.
She wouldn’t blame Lou if he never came back. But in case he did, or in case someone else came along in another seventeen years, she carefully boxed up all of his optical components and put them away in their labeled drawers. Then she gathered up all the trash, put the bag in the autoclave, and wiped down the benches with ethanol.
Next she went over to the ice lab and did the same housekeeping chores. Buboes in the hall avoided her, eyes downcast. They all knew van Gnubbern, who had been the undergraduate advisor to every physics major since Walter Waddles III.
As a final act, she raised the room’s set-point to room temperature, 70 degrees F. The remains of the ice cores would rapidly melt as the room warmed, leaving nothing but damp brown paper.
She felt no hunger or thirst, but was starting to get the twinge of a caffeine headache, so as soon as she was done she took off her lab coat and headed down the Rose Walk to Peet’s. Kicking away stray grapefruit, she thought of the first day she’d met Lou, and wondered what he was doing now. If he was lucky he was dead in a ditch in Florence, Colorado.
It was almost lunchtime and the bagel shop was hopping with ordinary people, ones who drove flashy cars and wore business suits, and always had a Bluetooth tucked behind their ears. She got the largest coffee and sat out in the quietest spot she could find outdoors, sipping it as quickly as her roiling stomach would allow.
The moment of peace didn’t last long, because some asshole had to rev the engine of his stinking car right in front of the patio. Lori picked up her stuff and prepared to move inside, wondering if the shithead would even care if she flipped him off.
“Lori! HEY! LORI!”
The only thing louder than Abby’s disgusting car was her voice.
Lori was embarrassed to be associated in any way with someone who drove a car like that, and she wanted nothing to do with Abby right now. How had she managed to get back from Colorado so quickly? Lou was with her, too, looking much too cheerful for the circumstances.
“Come to my office!” he called, and they peeled away in a plume of stench.
Lori took her sweet time finishing her coffee and walking back to campus. Fuck Abby and the Porsche she rode in on, she thought.
Pages were spewing out of Lou’s new printer when she got there, and he and Abby were both stacking and collating like mad.
“I had to remove Solomon Rose, but Kuzno signed with you as PI,” he explained excitedly. “We were lucky that the storm ended last night, so we flew straight back from Denver.”
“So what?” Lori snapped. “The President is on his way to Gstaad. It’s over. We lost.”
Abby smirked. “I bet you didn’t know that when the President is on vacation, the LEPER director can sign in his place.”
That seemed even more hopeless than catching a plane to Switzerland. “So? How do we find the LEPER director and bring him over to our side, when we’re the competition and it’s four days before Christmas?”
Abby plucked a sheet off the desk and held it up like a proud mama. “He owed me one,” she grinned.
Lori thought about ripping it up and throwing it in Abby’s face. “So what? I’m not going to sign as PI. Give it up, already—the horse is not only dead, its guts are all over the road.”
Lou and Abby exchanged some kind of glance—Lori knew exactly what kind. It was a Poor twisted little bitch had no one to look up to but Wigbert van Gnubbern glance.
&nbs
p; “Fuck you both,” she went on. “If this job turns people into killers, then I don’t want it.”
They both laughed some sort of laugh. She wasn’t sure what kind.
“Barrow,” said Lou cautiously, “we just had a long conversation on the plane, and we’re not really sure van Gnubbern did anything terrible. Bob Drift’s wife, what’s her name, just called the police last night and screamed that he’d said something about a `slow cold death’ and then waved a stick at her. He could have been talking about particle physics, for all we know.”
“Are you on crack?” Lori screamed, kicking his desk so hard that the printer stopped with a burp. “Of course it was van Gnubbern this whole time! He probably hired me as an undergrad to take the fall for when he murdered Silverman. But then he got clean away because we were all so stupid we thought it was an accident. Notice he always keeps a freak or two around him when he’s killing, though, so they’re the obvious first suspects.”
“Honestly,” said Lou with a deep yoga breath, “I don’t see—”
“You won’t see anything when Wigbert’s done with you!” she yelled. “He probably put eyeball-eating amebas on the microscope already! If you have contacts, take them out and throw them away right now.”
“Jesus Christ, Barrow.” Lou banged through a couple of drawers, finally coming out with a bottle of eyedrops that he applied liberally to each side. “Thanks for scaring the shit out of me. No contacts, but still…” He added more drops, blinking them onto the desk. “That’s just loathsome.”
“No worse than the things he’s already done! Letting someone slowly freeze while she bashed her head against the door? Showing up at the LEPERLab with some kind of mysterious electrodes, and clapping them across Dim Bulb’s temples? I could go on, but I think you get the gist.”
The door squeaked shut, and high-heeled footsteps echoed down the hall. Abby had made a discreet escape while Lori was shouting.
Lori didn’t really care. She leaned over the desk and peered into Lou’s well-washed eyes. “You know what else? That incident report wasn’t filed by Marybeth at all. I have her notebooks—her signature is printed, and I remembered that she told me she couldn’t write cursive for some bizarre-ass reason. The report has a loopy cursive `M,’ that when you look closely, is just like an upside-down version of Wigbert’s `W’!”