He shrugged. He was darker and poorer and had conspicuous style. People didn’t need their little girls to be found in pieces to fucking hate that.
“What are you doing with my cousin?” she said.
“What needs to be done,” he said.
“You know we’re in the cafeteria and not a Clint Eastwood movie?” she said.
“When you go to the bank do you ask for twenties or wheelbarrows?” he said.
“Lazy!” she said. “Money doesn’t make you dumb.”
Peter did not disagree—it just made you used to people caring what you think.
“Do you want my help or not?” she said.
“If things keep going down this road, someone very important to me is probably going to get hurt,” he said.
“Who?” she said.
“Me,” he said.
She was annoyed to find she couldn’t dispute the logic; she had already decided she was in, as if exclusion was even an option, but had been looking forward to making him work harder for it.
“Well, I’m glad you’re friends, anyway,” she said. “Roman doesn’t have enough friends. I mean, there’s those people.” She nodded her head toward Roman’s lunch table. “But all they care about is the name. Nobody really knows him. Least of all, Roman.”
She leaned in with a confidential aspect and looked at him intently, and Peter saw now with clarity. Her soul’s light, the wide-eyed mysticism that set her apart from the rest of these dipshits. Right. The thing Roman didn’t know it but he was really in this for, Order of the Dragon my ass. Good to know, unless it wasn’t.
“Promise me something,” she said. “Promise you won’t let things go too far. Promise you’ll keep him from doing anything stupid.”
Peter made a solemn face and smiled inside: he enjoyed the ceremony and impressiveness of making promises completely irrespective of his intention of keeping them.
“I promise I won’t let that happen,” he said.
They were quiet within the cafeteria babble. She shifted one leg over the other under the table intentionally grazing his shin, for which she falsely apologized but he paid no heed at all, filling her with the surpassing desire to give it a sharp kick. Then she realized it was the table leg she had artlessly footsied and projected on her face the exact opposite of how much dignity she felt.
“Can I ask you something?” said Peter.
She consented.
“What can you tell me about Roman’s mom?”
“Aunt Olivia? Why?”
“Curious.”
She bet he was. “What do you want to know?”
“What do you know about her?”
She thought, and shrugged. The truth was, nothing. No one did. In the ’80s JR had seen there was no way to compete realistically with the Chinese and decided to move from industry into biotech. He went abroad to inspect some facilities and came back engaged to the most beautiful and despised woman in the town’s history.
“Where did they meet?” said Peter.
“England, I think.”
“Is that where she’s from?”
She was not sure.
“What about her people?”
She shrugged.
“Do you think there’s any chance your dad knows more of the story?”
“Maybe. He was her shrink.”
Peter’s expression did not change but there was no hiding the crafty crackle this inspired.
“I don’t suppose you might be able to fish around and see if you can fill in some of the holes,” he said.
“Mixed metaphor!” she said.
He gave her a look that somehow made her feel dumb even though he was the one who went around mixing metaphors. This boy!
“Well, I don’t suppose life was getting interesting enough already,” she said.
“Life is always interesting,” he said.
“Did you steal that from a movie poster?” she said.
He opened a box of Cracker Jacks.
“Ooh, let me find the prize,” she said.
He held the box out, widening the opening between his grip, and she rooted with closed eyes, producing a plastic packet.
Peter looked at the prize and was quiet.
She opened her eyes. “Huh, weird,” she said.
She was holding a translucent pink plastic ring, a little nub in the middle like the drawing of a planet in orbit. A snake—a snake eating its own tail.
Peter held out his hand, and she gave him the ring. He opened it. “Wear it. It’s good luck,” he said.
Across the room, Roman watched Letha hold out her hand and Peter slip something around her finger.
* * *
That afternoon Dr. Chasseur waited in the atrium of the Godfrey Institute for Biomedical Technologies for an interview with its director. At the reception desk was a small man in a pink country-western-style shirt with rhinestone pistols at the shoulders skimming through an entertainment gossip magazine. Engraved in the marble flooring of the entrance was a horizontal line followed by an omega followed by another horizontal line:
* * *
She asked if this motif had any meaning. The receptionist shrugged. He licked a finger and turned a page.
Then there came from behind her the sound of footsteps approaching from the bank of elevators and she turned to see a man who appeared no older than forty, though he was over a decade past. His hair was black but tinted gray to suggest his real age and his face was a firm polyethnic blend. An uncommonly dense musculature was visible under his suit. He held out his hand. His hands were small in comparison with his build, and of almost feminine delicacy, curiously smooth even of the calluses along the pad of the palm common to bodybuilders.
“Dr. Johann Pryce,” he said, and there was a certain spurious slickness to his carriage and his smile that brought to mind the rainbow patina of oil on a puddle.
“Dr. Clementine Chasseur,” she said.
The receptionist, sipping a Diet Coke, abruptly coughed it back into the bottle. They looked over. He gesticulated at his tabloid.
“He’s marrying that whore!”
Pryce asked Chasseur if she objected to holding this interview over lunch.
Chasseur said that would be fine and Pryce escorted her outside and around the building. In the front lawn there was a cloistered quadrangle surrounding a carefully tended rock garden in the spiral pattern of a nautilus shell. She followed him to a white van in the parking lot, with the same omega motif repeated on the door.
“A hieroglyph, of a fashion,” Pryce answered, preempting by a fraction of a second her actually asking the question. “Adapted from the code of the samurai: no matter the length of the journey, it must be taken inch by inch, like the measuring worm.”
She looked again and saw it was in fact a literal visualization of that process:
* * *
He took out a set of keys and punched the button to unlock the van. “Truth be told, a lunch break will be the closest thing I get to a vacation this week,” he said.
She looked up at the White Tower. “Doesn’t it make you a little crazy?”
“Does the name Noah Dresner mean anything to you?”
It did not.
“He was the architect of the institute, which was to be the summation of his life’s work. Dresner was something of the Ahab of sacred geometry: the Fibonacci sequence, geomagnetic alignments, all that hokum-pokum. His intention was to culminate his legacy with the proverbial axis mundi: the connecting point between earth and sky. Upon the completion of this opus he took the elevator to the summit but collapsed and died of a brain hemorrhage by the fifth floor.”
Chasseur suggested this did not exactly answer her question.
Pryce tapped the side of the van with his knuckle. Inch by inch.
They relocated to an upscale Asian fusion restaurant near the mall.
“People inform me the sushi chef here is quite good,” said Pryce upon seating. “I wouldn’t know. If you told me tartar sauce on Styrof
oam was a delicacy, I’d probably believe you. It’s all glucose to me. I’m not Asian, incidentally.”
“You’re German and Brazilian,” said Chasseur. “You came to term at twenty-six weeks of age but after fairly spectacularly staging something of a prison break from your own incubator were diagnosed with the condition of myotonic hypertrophy. Superstrength, to us mortals. And you’re allergic to peanuts.”
“You read the Sunday Times,” said Pryce, in reference to a New York Times Magazine profile titled “Man and Superman” of which he had been the subject the previous winter, the sort of puff piece focusing on the more sensational aspects of his biography that he submitted to from time to time in order to hide in plain sight, diverting attention from the nascent stages of a project of unusual sensitivity.
“I have a hideously abusive relationship with the crossword,” she said. “But I keep on going back.”
His mouth smiled before his eyes did.
“Are you going to be recording this conversation?” he said.
“I hadn’t intended to, Dr. Pryce.”
“Johann. But I am, just so you know. Which is to say, I have been this whole time. Just so you know. You understand.”
She did not object. “So what exactly is it you do, Johann?” she said.
“Pretending you don’t know.”
“We’re strangers on a train.”
He smiled at the unusual prospect of play in the middle of a working day.
“I’m the director of the Godfrey Institute for Biomedical Technologies.”
“Whoa, Nellie, that sounds fancy. What do you do there?”
“The gamut. We design diagnostic equipment, prostheses, artificial organs, etc., and stand at the vanguard in pharmaceuticals, genetic manipulation, and nanotechnology today. We’re about to roll out a series of biosynthetic masks for burn victims that will convey human empathy via facial expression mirroring.”
“Does that explain your receptionist?” she said.
He was confused at first, then realized it was another attempt at humor, and again attempted to appear like he went in for that sort of thing. “No, we can’t take credit for Cesar. Actually, if you’d like to know a trade secret, all nonspecialist personnel are hired largely on the basis of an obvious disinclination toward natural curiosity.”
“You don’t want anyone asking questions.”
“We certainly don’t.”
“What kind of genetics experiments are you doing?”
“Principally gene therapy,” he said. “JR Godfrey foresaw, correctly, that while the malleability of material properties was what defined the crucial advances of the nineteenth century, it is the malleability of life itself that will define the twenty-first. And so his mandate was that the name come to mean for healing backs what it once did for breaking them, which happily aligned with my own inclinations. I can’t really discuss much of it, but then you would probably only be so interested in the treatment of vein graft stenosis in adult dogs anyway.”
“You do animal testing?”
“I respect you’re asking out of diligence, but do I really need to answer that?”
“How exactly did you get this job?”
“Because there is no one in my field working at a remotely comparable level.”
“But your own area of specialization is one of contention,” she said. “Exobiology, a highly speculative field dealing with possible nonterrestrial systems of life. In fact, I had some difficulty following the premise behind your first published and highly controversial paper. I found no shortage of … interpretations, but if you wouldn’t mind walking me through it.”
Pryce nodded. “You mean the one that has become popularly called ‘Better Reincarnation Through Chemistry.’ Certainly. In theory, if one took an existing but inanimate carbon-based structure—”
“A corpse,” she said.
“—that was still in a relatively labile situation—”
“A baby’s corpse,” she said.
“—one might weave into the existing structure the element phosphorus, which is capable of forming chain molecules of sufficient length and complexity to support life, new life. But phosphorus alone is dangerously unstable. However—in theory—a stable bond can be achieved in combination with nitrogen. Though we’re not quite out of the woods: molecular nitrogen is practically inert and very difficult to convert into energy—a necessity to an organism constituted of the stuff. But a rather dynamic solution could be found, of all places, in the bean world. Legumes host within their roots bacteria that fix soil nitrogen in exchange for resources from the host. So a subject as described might survive by hosting these bacteria in, say, for the sake of argument, the feet, requiring simply a ready supply of dirt. In theory.”
“A theory that discredited you in the eyes of many of your peers before your career even started. You were, if I might speak candidly, a provocative choice for one of the most competitive posts to open in your field.”
“An infuriating one!” said Pryce. “Oh, the shoes that were eaten that day. But just as Westinghouse patronized the future in alternating current, JR was a man more concerned with what lay past the horizon than with clinging with both hands to the sagging teat of orthodoxy. He was not, to use the vernacular, a complete fuckwit. Which cannot be said of many of my contemporaries.”
She noted he did not echo her use of the word peer.
“Do you mind,” said Chasseur, “if I ask you a personal question?”
“Insofar as we’ve been discussing my work, you have been all along.”
She nodded as one who could relate. “What attracted you to such a controversial discipline in the first place?”
His expression drifted and subtly dulled as though animating energies were absorbed for internal distribution, and studying this void it occurred to her she was seeing him for the first time fully inhabit his natural character. And as someone uniquely adept at not showcasing her emotions she realized that this subject accomplished the reverse trick in animating his face at all.
“Shortly into my eighth year I read for the first time the most important book ever written, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection,” said Pryce.
Chasseur nodded that that was indeed a dandy.
“I was enthralled,” said Pryce, “and yet troubled at the same time in a way I couldn’t identify, until I sat down and made a simple calculation.” He gestured at her as a for instance. “There is an exponential increase in system complexity through the upward progress of levels of organization. So I calculated the statistical probability of a system as stupefyingly complex as human consciousness arising from random mutation in the geologic age of the Earth. And I concluded that it is not. Probable. Or, for that matter, possible. By random mutation. Draw your own conclusions.”
By now she had quite an inventory.
“Now do you mind if I ask a question of my own?” said Dr. Pryce.
She made a hand gesture: Go ahead.
“You completed a doctorate in predator ethology at the University of Texas in 2004,” he said.
She did not reply. This was not a question, and he would not have chosen his words casually.
“How is this of any possible interest to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service?” he said.
She looked down. There was a glass top over the table that reflected the skylight above in such a way that it contained her doppelgänger peering back at her from within a lighted shaft. She looked back at Pryce with amiable surrender.
“You got me,” she said. “It’s not, I suppose. They just give me a lot of rope to do my job, and I have my own method. It’s a little elliptical.”
“If I’m not mistaken, to complement your training in sociobiology you have some experience with the Reid technique of interrogation and have been asking tangential questions to establish a rapport with the suspect as well as elicit behavior symptoms of truth and deception preparatory to a more direct confrontation.”
“Johann, is there any c
hance one of your test animals could have gotten loose?”
“No.”
“What about a test subject?”
“You mean a person?”
“Yes.”
“None whatsoever.”
She regarded him. And if moments before, the vacuum of basic human vitality in his face had been a momentary lapse, it was now strategically deployed: he had become such a blank that he could have been napping right there with his eyes open, or breathing dead. She had never before looked into another living person’s eyes and not found incontrovertible evidence of the human soul. She had never seen anything more terrifying.
She snapped her fingers. “Rats. And here I thought I’d cracked it. You wouldn’t have any of your own ideas on our demon dog, would you?”
His point made—you will get nothing from me that I don’t give you—Pryce suffered imitation of life to reinvest his features.
“I understand the animal has left no tracks,” said Pryce.
She nodded.
“I understand canid scat was discovered in the area containing large amounts of human hair, but from an adolescent male, of which none have gone missing. Further, I understand analysis of this scat revealed abnormally low levels of adrenal glucocorticoid, indicating that the animal not only had not recently engaged in an act of aggression, but also is by nature nonaggressive.”
She did not bother to inquire how he came into possession of this information.
“Your conclusion, Johann?” she said.
“I conclude I’m glad it’s your job to make sense of it and not mine,” he said. “However, considering the parallels between both killings, I would calculate the probability that these were not premeditated acts of a pathological sexual predator at within an order of magnitude of one in ten million.”
“But a person wouldn’t possibly have the ability to do what was done to those bodies. Not bare-handed.”
Dr. Pryce nodded. He reached into his breast pocket and produced a digital voice recorder. He held it in his soft, feminine hand and, giving her a collegial smile, made a fist that he tightened and tightened until its shell ruptured and its gadget innards spilled onto the table, which he tidily swept into a napkin and set aside.
“If a problem can’t be solved within the frame it was conceived, the solution lies in reframing the problem,” he said.
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