Prelude to a Scream

by Jim Nisbet

  Giles thought for a moment, until his eyes widened and he exclaimed, “No way!”

  “You sure?”

  “No way Tommy would.… Why should he?”

  “Money. Think about it, Giles. Is the guy in trouble? Paying child support? Driving too nice a car? Does he gamble?”

  Giles shook his head. “Tommy’s highly overpaid as it is. He likes to work at night. We hardly ever see him. In fact, he’s not on the regular payroll, he’s here as a consultant. He works for about ten government and corporate offices like this one. Does it all. Wires the place, sets up hardware and software, writes custom modules and subroutines, does network maintenance, installs upgrades.… He’s a re-seller, too. Guy’s smart and he’s good. No.” Giles shook his head. “He doesn’t need money. As far as I know, he doesn’t even care about money. What he cares about is computers. In fact, if he knew there was somebody fooling around on one of his systems, he’d go ballistic. Right through the roof. I guarantee he wouldn’t sleep until he figured it out. That’s the kind of guy he is.”

  “You trust him, then.”

  “I trust him.”

  “And me?”

  Giles looked at Stanley a moment, then looked away. “I’ve eaten a lot of goat-cheese pizza with Tommy,” he said. “He’s not like most of these other clowns around here, always goofing off, just waiting to get home and smoke some pot and watch Star Trek.”

  “What do you do after work?”

  “I go to the gym. Work out.”

  “Yeah. What about this guy Tommy?” said Stanley. “What’s he do after work?”

  “Other than eating pizza, I have no idea.”

  “Okay. So you don’t really know what he’s up to, outside of his business and his pizza habit.”

  “But messing around with this computer system, we’re talking about a couple of people’s jobs, here. This is a government-sponsored clinic, after all. There’s about ten watchdog agencies that will come down on this place like a ton of bricks if they think something funny’s going on.”

  “There’ll be a time I’d like to see that,” said Stanley coldly. “But not just yet.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “But… Mr. Ahearn, I guess my question is… supposing that you’re an honest man… why is this important enough to you to ask me to risk Tommy’s and my job for you?”

  “Forget about me. What about that little glitch we’ve just discovered? Doesn’t that make you wonder?”

  Giles glanced at the computer screen. “That’s a start.”

  “So?”

  Giles turned to face him. “It definitely makes me curious.”

  But it wasn’t quite enough. Stanley thought about this for a moment.

  Then he took a step backwards, raised his shirt, and turned his back to Giles.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Giles, almost inaudibly.

  “There used to be a type O-Negative kidney under that mess,” said Stanley, watching Giles’ expression over his shoulder. “I want to find the people who took it.”

  Giles was very pale. “They… They didn’t ask?”

  “No. They didn’t ask.”

  “I don’t feel so good.”

  Stanley dropped the shirttail. “Neither do I.”

  Giles inhaled deeply, gripped the armrests of his office chair, and swayed slightly. His eyelids fluttered. For a moment it looked as if he might pass out.

  Stanley let it ride. The fluorescent light over his head hummed like an electric razor. The recycled air was full of the voices of people speaking in undertones. A telephone rang. Stanley stood head and shoulders above the office partitions, but only at the opposite end of the huge room, far away, did he see another human being.

  After a minute Giles said, “This is what that cop was looking for.”

  Stanley nodded.

  “Why not tell him?”

  Stanley watched Giles. “Sure. Why not?”

  Giles squirmed in his chair, then swiveled back to face his computer. On its screen, the cursor blinked over the Y in Stanley’s donor-info box. Giles tapped the Y key, then the N key. Y, N. Y, N. The Y in the donor-info box persisted.

  “Okay,” he said finally, after a thoughtful sigh. “Let’s see what Tommy can come up with. At the very least he’ll put a stop to this bogus data-sort, here.” He frowned at the computer screen. “Or whatever it is…”

  “You on the Net?”

  “Sure.”

  “Got an address book?”

  “Of course.”

  “Bring it up.”

  When Giles had his net addresses on the screen, Stanley showed him Fong’s mailbox address, written on a page in his notebook. FIREBIRD@SWEET.COM.

  Giles typed it in.

  “E-mail me anytime,” said Stanley. “Make sure it’s private, and ask for a receipt.”

  He extended his hand.

  Giles shook it.

  When he reached the waiting room, Stanley realized he still had the pink form in his hand. He paused for a moment, gazing at the form without really seeing it. Was this kid Giles what a cop would call a break? And so what if he was? Stanley was still out one kidney, and half out of the other one.

  Glancing up from the pink test request, Stanley found himself looking into the eyes of the last customer of the day. He was an emaciated man with deep-set eyes, seated in a corner, who had just raised his chin from the mallard’s-head crook of a walking stick he’d been resting it on. His clothes hardly fit him, they drooped as if they’d been cut for a much larger man. His hair was thin. The bones of his skull showed clearly beneath the drawn, parchment-like skin of his face. While it was not the face of an old man, the eyes belonged to one.

  The informative videotape muttered quietly from the opposite corner of the room.

  The young man’s old eyes glistened, wreathed in shadow, hollow, careworn, haunted.

  Stanley let the slip of pink paper flutter to the floor and limped out to the sidewalk.

  Chapter Eleven

  GILES WAS A LUCKY BREAK.

  The question now: what to do with his information?

  Information was the wrong word. A trick in a computer program wasn’t information, it was a trick in the information, that is to say, it was a clue. But it wasn’t information.

  So somebody screens the patients of a sexual diseases clinic for O-Negative blood. Then what? What do they do with this information?

  For that matter, having diddled the software, why just one clinic? Why not several? And if several, what more would it take to diddle the entire DonorNet? Just a computer freak with a phone line? Was it so easy?

  An organization? Organ-ization. At last Stanley gets the joke. Stendhal declared murder and puns incompatible; but what about puns and nephrectomy?

  An organization could bring a computer freak on board, somebody to finagle the health clinic’s software. But what kind of guy could write software and perform nephrectomies too? No kind of guy, probably. It would be difficult to believe there could be one such person in the entire world. A character with the skills necessary to trapdoor a big software program and perform nephrectomies on the side wouldn’t have to break the law to make all the money he could possibly use, no matter what his tastes.

  So that left an organization with at least two highly skilled members.

  A national database of organ, blood and bone marrow donors would have access to, and be able to be accessed by, its users, which in turn would mean other nets, which in turn would mean telephone lines and hackers. Security would be a consideration; perhaps not a top priority, but important, because the people in charge of the donor net wouldn’t know about the pirate harvesting scheme. If they knew about it, security would be tight. If they knew about the scheme and security wasn’t tight, it would follow that not only would the people running the donor net know about the harvesting scheme, but they would be in on it.

  Pretty complicated. A big organization. A big organization means leaks. It means mistakes.
>
  But if the information were freely given by the members of the database? With a little coaxing from some finagled software, of course…

  Security wouldn’t be a problem.

  Think of it. You sit down to a computer terminal. You log on to, say, America Online, Prodigy, CompuServe, or the World Wide Web. Via scientific or medical databases or university computers you find your way to the donor database, you log on with Giles’ password…

  By virtue of the mere fact that you’ve been able to log on, the database has accorded you professional status. As a professional, you seek certain information. As host to a professional database, the computer’s job is to give you that information.

  Say you work for a drug-testing firm. Done with horse and goat cultures, you are now ready to try out your new AIDS vaccine on a human control group. This group should consist of, say, 250 HIV-positive ARC or AIDS patients with T-cell counts between 200 and 500, who have never taken any retro-viral vaccines or drugs, who have never had any form of radiation therapy, who show no signs of other viral diseases, and whose taste in underclothing runs to untanned leather.

  National database, do your stuff.

  Or let’s suppose you have an interest in kidneys.

  Healthy kidneys. Kidneys that test HIV-negative, show no other signs of disease, the leather issue’s neither here nor there, it’s no sweat if there’s no histocompatibility workup available…

  We’ll work out histocompatibility later.

  After we get to know the patient a little better.

  After we’ve taken a kidney from him.

  In post-op, there’s all the time in the world.

  Especially if somebody else is paying the bill.

  But say, Database, while you’re in there sorting thousands of patients, cough up boys and girls between 20 and 50 years of age with no discernible health problems, HIV-negative of course, that’s very important, we could even specify that they be heterosexual and live in, let’s say, the San Francisco Bay Area.

  Because, let’s speculate, we’ve got a really good guy out there in San Francisco. A fine surgeon. Other than whatever it is that allowed us to persuade a talented surgeon to sign on with the likes of us organ pirates, who sail for renal plunder, there’s only one problem with this talented guy: Talented Guy doesn’t like Federal Heat.

  So dump onto the A: drive — Drive Not Ready, Christ, insert the floppy —: all God’s children on this database who fit the criteria and who also live in the greater Bay Area, so our man doesn’t have to travel, and so we don’t have to get into any kidnapping raps, crossing state lines with criminal intent, bringing down the FBI on our bad selves, that kind of stuff. It’s always messy, to cross state lines to commit a crime. Probably need an ambulance, portable generators and portable refrigerators, all kinds of drugs, tools, glassware and an operating room in a Winnebago; a good map of camping facilities with water and sewage hookups in the host states; gunsels with steely eyes slouching against the roll-out awning who flick a contemptuous cigarette toward the campfire singalong at the next site over; nurses who look like grandmothers; ice-cooled perfusion machines, tubes and wires, a fake gas tank for the Ringer’s solution, attendants, coordination, organization — and still a gun in the glove compartment. What would all that trouble and expense get you? A federal rap, curated by the FBI.

  Get a grip, Stanley. Leave camping and the FBI out of this. Stick with a local scene, the local cops. Stick with understaffed police departments with low budgets and we don’t have too much to worry about. We might even have one or two of them on the payroll…

  But, hey, Database? There’s just one more thing, one more little favor.

  Put a little asterisk next to the names of the candidates who come up type O-Negative. Would you? Thanks so much.

  Those type O-Negative kidneys, they bring a much better price.

  Cough ’em up, Database.

  Put’em on this diskette.

  I got a habit to support…

  Iris Considine lived in the back of a six-unit building just below the University of California Medical Complex, a block south of the jog in the streetcar tracks at Carl and Arguello. There’s fog at that intersection when the sun’s shining everywhere further east, its gloom assisted by the towering hospital parking garage, and when the streetcar rumbles across Arguello from Irving and turns onto Carl in a thick evening fog, its inside lights turn its passengers into a horizontally scrolling tableau vivant. People reading their papers, sleeping agape against the windows, standing and staring with their backs to each other, gazing fondly up and down at one another, all of them in that peculiar daze municipal transport puts people into—the whole drifts past like installments in serial monogamy.

  The neighborhood has a lot of medical types living in it. Clerks, janitors, hematologists, radiologists, nurses, doctors, residents and whatnot. It was a neighborhood Stanley rarely visited. It had one or two of the tall buildings that he liked to know were around him at any given time, but the structural and population densities were altogether too thin for his nervous system; he preferred the crush of Chinatown. The spiritual cleanliness usually termed anomie, scrubbed by the bath of the crowd, achieves a special purity when the crowd you’re taking your bath in is chattering in a language you don’t understand. Chinese made Stanley very comfortable—as would any other language in the world excepting English, including Klingon; it left him alone with his thoughts, and thoroughly anonymous.

  Take medical jargon, he was thinking, as he rang the bell of Iris’ apartment. For a guy who had not darkened the door of anything more medical than a tattoo parlor for the better part of his adult life, Stanley was really having the tour. The up side of the tour was that all the medical jargon he was hearing made him feel nearly as anonymous as Chinese did. Except he reckoned Chinese as much more mellifluous. Medical jargon reminded him of nothing if not sea lions barking, in an environment characterized by a lot of funny smells, people dressed in white, and mucus that tastes like puréed herring.

  The down side of the tour was its cost: one body part.

  A second streetcar rolled through the intersection at the top of the block, heading in the direction opposite the first one. Nearly empty, its illuminated interior hovered in the night and fog, parallel to the nearly invisible street below it. Something must have gone wrong, Stanley thought. That’s too many streetcars this late at night. Too much service at the wrong time.

  The front door buzzed, and he let himself into the lobby, a fluorescent box painted and tiled in earth-tones with a quiet, waterless fountain, a nest of aluminum mail boxes, and, next to a jacaranda tree in a redwood tub, a chair nobody ever sat in. Posture long since ruined by the low ceiling, as if cowed toward its grave by the implacable radioactivity of the acoustical ceiling’s twinkling gypsum, the tree crouched in its corner like a tall old functionary, stooped from a lifetime of deference, an incontinent stain spreading from beneath its tub like a secret revenge on the master who took it for granted.

  A flight of carpeted stairs, its blended-tobacco color designed to conceal decades of quotidian drudgery, lifted him up to a third-floor hallway. The twin strains of lavender incense and Haunted Heart as interpreted by Jo Stafford invited him to limp on in, through an open door at the back.

  Iris stood in the kitchenette, making a drink.

  The entire place was decorated in blue. The floor was wall-to-wall dark blue carpet, deep and fuzzy. The walls themselves were a few shades lighter and the ceiling probably lighter yet, though it was too dark in the apartment to make it out. Any daylight that penetrated the place would have to find its way through a large tank of fish that stood between the viewer and a glass sliding door that led to a narrow outside deck. But there was no daylight, and Iris hadn’t gotten around to putting on any more lights than she had clothes.

  She came around the corner of a little built-in bar wearing a clinking glass and a kimono. There’s white-belted, there’s brown and black-belted; but then there’s loosely-be
lted, which has been known to defeat them all.

  “Hi,” she piped cheerfully, handing him the drink as, redolent of soap, she brushed past him. “Did I ever tell you about the American in Paris who tried to ask for a straw and got a blowjob?”

  “No. We just met, remember? What about it?”

  “Beats me. I just like the story.”

  She closed the door behind him. “Is the patient okay with whiskey?”

  “If the patient is alive, the patient is okay with whiskey.” Stanley limped into the living room, trying not to trip over anything in the gloom. The incense boded emphysema.

  Iris stood very close to him. “I was wondering when you were going to show up.”

  “I don’t get that many invitations,” said Stanley. “It takes me a long time to react.”

  The loosely wrapped kimono was a beauty. When she turned to retrieve a cigarette from a hollow glass bust of Sigmund Freud, a red-eyed dragon of indisputable gravity flared its green nostrils and splayed silver talons across her back: a carp-whiskered malevolence, poised atop a golden-scaled tail that coiled possessively about her.

  The whiskey was interesting, too. Stanley judged it a single-malt.

  “I don’t give that many.” Iris sat on the couch against the wall at right angles to the bookcase and crossed her legs, which split the front of the kimono all the way to her hip.

  “Straws?”

  She smiled and patted the cushion next to her. “Invitations.”

  Stanley gently let himself down into the cushions, which were very low. He made it down okay, but he wasn’t sure he could get up again without tearing his sutures.

  She handed him a green butane lighter. “Still hurting?”

  He stared at the lighter a moment, then turned it in the gloom. The logo of some medical association was stamped on it. He shrugged and lit her cigarette. “Since when does a nurse smoke?”

  She exhaled smoke into his face and sat back on the cushions. “Since she discovered she likes to sin a little while she’s away from the office. About twenty years ago.”

  He put the lighter on the coffee table and watched it. “I just thought a nurse ought to know better.”