At a signal from Hap, the negotiator went on. “When we met in the middle of the no-man’s-land between the cars, I could see one of the kidnappers was trembling, and that’s when I was one hundred percent sure. He was young, skinny, grubby, and obviously terrified. I told them to get Lady from the truck and bring her to me immediately or no deal. Normally I would have had the money in my case under my arm, but being already suspicious, I’d left it in the van to give myself a bit of leeway. ‘Bring me the woman and I’ll get the cash,’ I said to them. The young one pulled his gun and aimed it at me. The kid was shaking so badly he could easily have shot me by mistake, and his friend saw that and grabbed the gun from him. It was stupid and frightening and the air was thick with panic. These weren’t professionals, or if they were, something had happened and they were reacting very badly. It had to be the worst thing possible.”
The negotiator had whistled to his friend in the car, who jumped out and aimed his high-powered rifle at the kidnappers, who in turn ducked and raced, bent low, to the truck. The negotiator saw that when the first man jumped into the driver’s seat, the third shadowy passenger who had been left in the cab slumped to the side. It had to be Kathryn, and she was clearly not conscious. The negotiator gave a silent signal to the men he had planted around the site, and when the truck took off and screeched in a U-turn to escape, it was met by a row of four masked men aiming guns at the driver. They dragged the kidnappers from the truck, but it was too late. Kathryn was already dead.
AFTER THE NEGOTIATOR had arranged to have Kathryn’s body transported to the US, and before the police became involved, the negotiator’s team took the kidnappers to a safe house in Colombia to interrogate them. The story they heard was of men faced with a phenomenon that unseated all their assumptions, the effect Kathryn had on everyone.
They would have taken any one of the three Wonders, the men said, but Kathryn had been lagging behind, easy to pick off. Everything had been calm and professional inside the plane that was flying them under the radar. Kathryn was hooded and silent. Her captors stayed alert and tense until she was secured in the house in the mountains.
Once they removed the hood and her cape inside the small room where she was imprisoned, they couldn’t stop staring. For the first day, she said little and didn’t resist their furtive touches of her wool. Then for no reason, they said, she began to laugh. They were already unsure, afraid they might have made a mistake in taking someone so high-profile. One of the men smacked her when she spat at him. They slipped into an uneasy quiet, taking turns to sleep while the leader put together the ransom demand.
After the demand had been sent, Kathryn heard them talking about the ransom. She laughed and told them they should have asked for more. She told them they were stupid and amateur. One of the men brought out a bottle of rum to calm everyone down. He passed the bottle around. Soon they moved on to another bottle.
There were two kidnappers on guard and two sleeping when the cattle prod, which had only been used once for the first recording, was retrieved from another room by the youngest, most inflamed gang member. The noise of his drunken shouting woke everyone. He waved the prod in front of Kathryn as the others urged him to settle down, to remember why they were there. “She can’t feel it,” he said to them, circling her like a man with a burning brand edging around a tiger. “Look at her, she’s not human. She’s an animal. They don’t feel the things we do. See?” And he jabbed her with the prod.
The others watched as Kathryn jerked about under the electric current, then fell to the floor. One nudged her with the toe of his boot. There were now five men in the room. Three were trying to talk the other two into settling down, reminding them that this was business, that Kathryn was their meal ticket. The first young man edged around her, leaning in to look closely at her head, her pale ears. When his boot accidentally contacted her buttock her body jerked involuntarily even though she was unconscious. He jumped back, startled, then kicked her. She lay motionless.
“See?” he slurred. “It can’t feel anything. It’s a dumb animal.”
After a few seconds she woke, still shackled to the wall next to the camp bed in the small dank room in the mountainside jungle. When the leader saw the facial bruising that had been hidden as she lay on the floor, he recognized they were in trouble. He had her lifted back onto the bed and tied her into a sitting position. He got on the computer and made the demand to bring forward the ransom handover, and he uploaded footage to prove she was still alive. The drunken man who had kicked her was locked in the room next door. But it wasn’t long before the drunk broke out, propelled by lust and a revulsion at his own urges, and wrestled a gun from his fellow kidnapper.
“If they had taken one of you men,” the negotiator told everyone at Overington, “everything would have been different.”
Kathryn’s body was flown to Overington. There was a quick private service. Rhona, who had been gifted with power of attorney for each of the Wonders when they signed up, ordered that Kathryn be cremated so that no one else could violate her body.
THE PROFESSIONAL COUNSELORS failed to come up with a single consolation that Leon hadn’t read in a self-help book. The household at Overington stumbled through the next few days, trying to avoid speaking about Kathryn, trying not to imagine her last moments. All they could manage was a sorrowful mask, behind which lay the immovable glutinous gray mound of their grief.
Rhona, when she finally emerged from her room, leaning on Hap, called a meeting. She asked them to bring everything personal from Kathryn’s quarters. She wanted to touch Kathryn’s things, hold them in her hands, sniff them and think about Kathryn, before the distant relatives who had swarmed out of nowhere when Lady Lamb went global came to lay claim to everything from the dead woman they used to despise. And who had shunned them in return.
All morning Leon and Minh carried the cosmetics and medicines and perfumes and trinkets and ornaments piece by piece from Kathryn’s quarters to the floor in the common room. Christos and Yuri brought out the capes and cloaks, the ao dai and the saris, the shoes. Kyle brought the jewelry trees, walking so slowly and with such a somber face he could have been a priest holding aloft burning candelabras at a requiem mass. When everything was piled in a messy heap on the carpet, Rhona pulled her chair next to the mound and lifted objects with care. She turned them over, examined them, pressed them against her face, rubbed them between her palms.
There were many cloaks in the pile. At first Kathryn had balked at wearing anything over her wool, but she came to love the cloaks. The drama of the cloak as it furled around her. The privacy against the gaze of the curious. Cloaks of rich ruby red and gold. Sea blue-green woven with alternate threads of silver and color that caught the light when she moved. Satin and silk and cotton and rayon. Some were patterned with paisley swirls and others with traditional tartans.
Christos was the first to pull on a cloak. He chose a midnight-blue velvet. Too short, of course, and not wide enough. But the neck had a long drawstring of silk plaited cord that he tied in a loose knot at his throat. He drew the cloak in close, covering his arms. He pressed his cheek to his shoulder and breathed in deeply.
“I can smell her.”
Yuri picked up her most fantastic cloak, the one she wore to impress at parties. It was the padded silk of a Chinese emperor’s robe, hand-embroidered in scarlet and gold and green with the scene of a palace on a hillside and the sun rising behind it, peasants working in the fields below, their conical hats tipped against the sun’s rays, pantaloons puffed out above the shimmering silver of the watery rice fields. Yuri draped it over his shoulders, and his knees buckled a little under the weight.
Rhona swung a flimsy ivory silk and antique lace cloak across her shoulders. She was too short, and it dragged behind her on the ground. Hap shook his head, but she stared at him until he relented and picked up a denim cape, short, more of a swing jacket, and draped it across his shoulders. It made the others laugh, seeing him embarrassed in such an incongruous piece of cloth
ing when they had only ever seen him wearing fatigues. Minh ran, still laughing, to the pile and took a cloak made of colorful braided plastic from the rubbish dumps of the Philippines that Kathryn had commissioned and paid fifty times what the makers asked.
“Kyle?” Rhona asked. He was in the corner of the room, away from the others. After the revelation about the leaks, even though he had continued to work for the Wonders, he had distanced himself, spent even less time with the household than before. “It’s okay. Really, hon. You know, Kathryn told me she was sorry she couldn’t be what you wanted. She’d forgiven you for the leaks. We all accepted, in the end at least, that they had worked for us.”
Kyle turned his face to the wall beside him. He lifted his hand to his brow. His Adam’s apple was bobbing up and down.
“Oh, darling.” Rhona picked up a pea-green velvet cloak and took it over to Kyle. She arranged it over his shoulders and pulled it tight so it swaddled him while he stood passively, hunched over, weeping. Leon felt the familiar rise of a swollen sob in his chest. How badly he had misjudged Kyle. Kyle had been devoted to Kathryn from the first moment he met her. It was as simple as that.
“What about you, Leon?” Minh grasped his arm and led him to the pile. The plastic braid of her cloak rustled as she walked. Leon had a sudden memory of Kathryn striding in front of him into a New York penthouse where a private show was to be held. The cloak hissed and crackled as she moved, and when they reached the doorway where a servant in white tails was bowing as he held open the sturdy oak door, she turned to Leon and laughed. “Should I tell them that this cloak came out of a garbage dump?”
Minh pulled an olive satin cloak from the pile and brushed it straight before holding it up against Leon. “No, makes you look too pale.” She rummaged deeper into the pile. “How about this one?”
The cloak of synthetic fur looked like a mangy pelt—the shabby trophy from a hunt of the colonial era. Another of Kathryn’s jokes.
Leon still hadn’t told Minh about the time he should have listened to Hap and urged him to act on his fears. She had heard many times the story of how Leon and Christos raced out of the entertainment center instead of staying with Kathryn in a tight safe group as Hap had ordered them to do. But it was always Christos telling the story.
Maybe he could have helped Kathryn, maybe he could have saved a life, maybe he could have changed something for the better, maybe he could have become a better man, maybe his actions would have ruined everything. He didn’t know. But he did know that he hid these things from Minh because he was afraid they would diminish him in her eyes. A cascade of shoulds tumbling back to his childhood.
Leon took the scrappy cloak and lifted it to his shoulders. The Velcro straps barely met around his throat. He tore the Velcro away, tossed the cloak onto the pile and took a few deep breaths before bracing himself and choosing a pale green cotton cloak that settled loosely around his shoulders.
“Now what?” he said. He was unworthy of wearing Kathryn’s cloak. He would have to tell Minh what he had done. Minh reached over and touched his arm. Leon placed his hand over hers and changed his mind for the hundredth time. He could never tell her. He must never tell anyone.
Christos slammed a fist on the table. “Now nothing, Leon. Think of Kathryn. Honor her.”
SHE HAD CONTACTED Leon and asked him to meet her in Manhattan. At first he didn’t recognize her. The gray hair that used to hang over him as she examined his chest was clipped close to her scalp. She wore an oversized scarlet shirt and a teal scarf on top of white linen pants. Back in the basement she was always in black pants and a pastel shirt covered by the lab coat that had grown more stained and threadbare as the year of Leon’s surgeries wore on. Here in the diner she stood when he moved toward her. He quickened his pace. He wanted to push forward and embrace her, and yet it wasn’t her, it was a new Susan, and he had to respect that.
“Leon, I’m so sorry about Lady.”
Her hand reached out and without thinking he took the hand and shook it. They stood beside a booth in the diner on Seventh Avenue. When Leon went to kiss Susan on the cheek she pulled away and made out to be adjusting her clothes before she settled into the booth again.
“It’s a tragedy. I truly am so very sorry,” she said, once they were sitting facing each other. “It unsettled me in ways I hadn’t imagined.”
An old-fashioned chrome-and-red-vinyl bar ran the length of the diner, opposite the booths. Glass domes covered muffins and pieces of pie. A waitress came over with her pen and pad poised, and listed the lunch specials in a monotone. They ordered the soup of the day.
“Susan, I . . .” Leon wasn’t sure what he wanted to say, even though he had been fretting about it all the way down from Overington. He had asked the driver to turn down the radio to give him space to think. Now he wished he had made notes or rehearsed the conversation the way Minh suggested. “Thank you for contacting me. I wanted—”
“I shouldn’t have ordered food,” Susan interrupted. Behind her another waitress was reciting the specials to a pair of customers. “This isn’t social. Leon, I’ve contacted you because I have to make a confession.”
He could see their soup coming. Two big steaming bowls of crimson tomato soup carried precariously by their bored waitress. She landed the plates on the table and pushed them toward Leon and Susan. The soup rocked inside the bowls.
“I want to give you money,” he said. “However much you need. To make hearts for people who can’t get them. I’m very very rich. I’ll be rich for the rest of my life.”
Susan dropped her forehead to the V of her hand and rested her elbow on the table. She was silent for a moment. Leon took a breath, ready to persuade her, but she spoke first.
“When we sent you off with the new heart and I took Howard to the coast for his last few weeks, I was so angry, Leon. Angry at Howard’s final year spent in a basement, hiding, working madly. Angry at his ambition, at his stubbornness, even at you. I spent a year watching him deteriorate. You know we did what we did because he was dying.”
“I know,” Leon said. “I know and I’m more than grateful.”
“Yes, but you don’t understand. After he died, I decided that we had wasted that time. Sure, we saved you, but one life? One life in exchange for our last year together? I wished we hadn’t known he was dying. If we hadn’t, he would have worked at a normal pace, thinking he had years to complete his project. We could have spent our time like normal people. We could have drunk wine and swum in the sea and traveled. But no, he had to finish that work because he knew he was dying. So I decided, Leon, that it was better if people didn’t know they were dying. That no one should know how much time they had left.” She paused.
The hollow deep rumble of traffic and the hooting of horns washed into the diner as a man held open the diner door and spoke a few words with an acquaintance passing by. Leon leaned forward to hear better as Susan went on.
“Then Lady Lamb and the whole kidnapping thing. It was so shocking—taken in her prime. And, Leon, I realized I was wrong. I thought about how young you are. You do need to know. It has to be your choice how you spend your remaining time. The problem is the battery. Inside the heart, sealed in there, is a battery that will run out. We had no choice. At the time we had no other way to power the heart, and the design didn’t allow an external battery, so we used Howard’s experimental metabolically recharging battery. It has a limited life.”
When the man crossed back to his seat at the counter, the tide of noise receded with the slowly closing door.
More I would, but Death invades me, Leon remembered. “How long?”
THE IRONY DIDN’T escape Leon. What use was being a Wonder when after all the suffering, the surgery, the pain, the training, the struggle to become something more than human, you simply died like everybody else? Kathryn had died, and he would follow soon enough. Maybe one more year, maybe, if he was lucky, three or four. The hype of the Wonders had made him feel immortal. What a fool.
; After Kathryn’s death there were some celebrations: the fundamentalists who had feared and loathed Kathryn called it a triumph that someone had assassinated her and held religious services to give thanks. The rest of the planet mourned. The data world and the real world were swamped with images of Lady, poems to Lady, tributes, TV specials rushed out with montages of footage and hasty interviews with people who hardly knew her, instant books and magazine articles and rambling online posts and conspiracy theories and flowers, flowers everywhere.
At Overington the road was blocked for a week by the vigil of mourners and onlookers and the flowers piling up until they began to rot underneath, and the stench became so bad that the local authority sent in a bulldozer to clean up. Leon caught a whiff of the sickly sweet putrefaction one day as he sat beside the open window. People were milling around outside, weeping, calling out “Lady” as if Kathryn could hear, still tossing bouquets and dolls and heart cushions onto the fetid overblown mounds along the fence, just as they had years before when that English princess died. What drove them to be so incensed with grief for a woman they had never met?
Three weeks later, news broke of a young actress’s botched breast surgery. Her televised sobbing pleas to young women to love and respect their bodies blanketed the media. The herd swerved and galloped after her, leaving Kathryn’s memory behind. Bookings at plastic surgeons soared, even as the images of the actress’s mutilated breasts were beamed around the world. The fans who had bought skintight suits modeled on Kathryn’s wool dropped them off at charity bins until the charities said they would not accept any more, and a month after that, Kathryn and the other Wonders’ paraphernalia was being carted in truckloads to landfills.
During this time, Leon and the remaining house members drifted around Overington in a lethargic stupor of misery. The air began to gather an autumn chill as the building louvers rotated with their slow solemn fanning. Maisie and Maximus ambled through the grounds on their daily constitutional and Agnes kicked up her heels with two new ponies that had been sent by a retiring television trainer. Rosa the chimp had a new companion as well, a pet chimpanzee confiscated from a convicted drug dealer who had arrived at Overington half-starved and fearful. That gave Yuri a task to keep him occupied and not thinking constantly about Kathryn—the rehabilitation of the new chimp and the appeasement of a jealous Rosa. After a few weeks, Christos buried himself in planning for his next project. Rhona and Hap took a vacation in Italy.
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