The Pinocchio Syndrome

by David Zeman

  Susan smiled.

  “Well, then,” she said. “I guess you’d know.”

  He could see from the look in her eyes that she was less reassured than she pretended to be. The temptation to protect her, to comfort her, was strong.

  “Call me if anything worries you,” he said. “That’s what I’m here for.”

  “I will,” she said. “Thanks. And don’t be such a stranger from now on.”

  He got into his car and started the engine. The car was chilled already by the cold sunless air. As he drove off he saw Susan in his rearview mirror, smiling and waving. She looked very natural, framed that way against the cheerful red brick of Michael’s house. She grew smaller and smaller as he drove away. He couldn’t stop looking back, though, and saw her turn to go back into the house just before he reached the corner.

  27

  —————

  Alexandria, Virginia

  January 15

  LIQUOR HAD been with Karen Embry all her life. She used to hate the sweet smell of the booze on her mother’s breath when the mother came in to say good night. That cloying odor symbolized her mother’s absorption in her own drunkenness and her lack of interest in her daughter. Usually she interrupted an argument with her husband for the good night kiss, and resumed the argument in slurred words as soon as the little girl’s bedroom door was closed.

  When Karen’s father left, the quarrels ended. There was only the sound of the TV from the other room, and the clink of ice in her mother’s glass. Karen found herself missing even the ugly quarrels, because they at least meant she had a father.

  She never saw him again. He was killed in a one-car accident two years after he left. He drove off a quiet country road straight into a thick oak tree at eight o’clock in the morning. His blood alcohol was five times the legal limit. “Serves him right,” Mother said.

  A series of boyfriends, all alcoholics, followed the father. One of them sexually abused Karen repeatedly over a seven-month period, until her mother threw him out for “spending all her money.” Karen told no one about what had happened. She didn’t trust the world of adults.

  From the time Karen entered junior high in Waltham, Massachusetts, her efforts in school were devoted to the single purpose of getting her out of her mother’s house. She became a reporter even then, working for the school newspaper. In high school she found part-time work at a suburban weekly and acted as a stringer for theGlobe . As a junior she applied for early admission to Northwestern and was admitted to its prestigious journalism school.

  She was never at home. She filled her time with clubs, reporting, the lacrosse team (until she injured her knee and had to quit)—and, when that wasn’t enough, boys.

  She slept with a half dozen of the boys in her own class and the class ahead of hers. She was attractive, a slender, nubile teenager with black shining hair and bright eyes. She could have any boy she wanted.

  She felt nothing in these encounters. Somewhere deep inside herself she knew she was not ready for love, would perhaps never be ready. But she was learning the art of manipulation, an art she knew she would need as a journalist.

  At Northwestern she did a grueling double major in biochemistry and journalism. She slept with a visiting professor who was a columnist for theSt. Louis Post-Dispatch . He had many contacts throughout the profession and helped her get summer jobs in Chicago at theTribune .

  One winter evening, as Karen was leaving her dorm on Sheridan Road to fight her way through the vicious Lake Michigan wind to the library, she was stopped by a friend with a message. Her mother had been found dead in her bungalow back in Boston, apparently the victim of a heart attack brought on by years of alcohol abuse.

  Karen flew home to dispose of her mother’s few possessions. The house was so full of empty liquor bottles that her aunt and uncle had to carry them out in cartons with a hand truck.

  When the lawyer had finished his work and the house was empty, Karen stood alone in the living room at midnight. She filled a glass with straight bourbon and drank a toast to her past.

  “On the house,” she said, pouring the dregs of her drink on the pockmarked hardwood floor.

  Her first serious job was as a political reporter for theTribune . After two years, fed up with the lake wind and Chicago politics, she took a job at theNew York Post . She would have stayed, but theGlobe offered her a job as an investigative reporter. Her major in biochemistry came in handy as she began to specialize in public health stories. Her series of articles on toxic waste resulted in billion-dollar lawsuits against four New England manufacturers. She also did features on negligence in the HMO industry. These played well in the Sunday magazine section, for health issues were always popular among readers.

  As the years passed she grew more cynical about power and its uses. People in high places told the truth as seldom as possible. They sought only to protect their own asses and to increase their influence. Whether they worked in government or in the private sector, they cared little for the human race. Karen enjoyed cutting them down to size.

  By now her paranoid “hunches” about wrongdoing in high places had become well known to colleagues. “Embry sees conspiracies in baseball scores and wind chill factors,” joked one editor. Sometimes her hunches were wrong. But when they were right she got to important stories weeks or months ahead of other reporters. And her stories rated headlines.

  Her search for the truth had become a thinly disguised vendetta against a faceless adversary. Karen was a crusader who believed in nothing. The awards she won were like so many shields covering her own emptiness. The liquor she drank was the elixir that allowed her to make believe she was happy.

  She thought she would go on this way forever. Absorbed in her work, she had lost the impulse to know herself. She was living with Troy, who was as bad a workaholic as she and had his own substance abuse problems.

  Then the thin ice she was walking on collapsed under her.

  First Troy dumped her. He told her he could no longer stand the burden of her depression added to his own. “We’re a bad combination,” he said. Karen let him go without hard feelings, but he left a gap. Not only in her apartment, but in her sense of her own possibilities.

  A month after their breakup Karen became convinced through some subtle hints that a major hospital supply company in downtown Boston was a front for an illegal drug operation. Though it was only a hunch, she pressed her editor for additional manpower to pursue the story. The editor sent two reporters to surveil the location overnight. No drug transaction took place. But by an unfortunate happenstance one of the reporters was killed in a drive-by shooting at two o’clock in the morning. It turned out the supply house was located on gang turf.

  When the editor went to Karen’s apartment to tell her the bad news, he found Karen passed out drunk on her living-room floor.

  Karen’s hunch had been wrong. The hospital supply company was innocent of any wrongdoing. A reporter was dead for no reason.

  Karen immediately tendered her resignation. It was accepted. She moved to Washington as a freelance reporter.

  She intended to work alone from now on. She felt responsible for the disaster in Boston. She was fed up with editors anyway. The politics of print journalism were too turbid for her, and the salary was too low. She wanted to write feature stories that would evolve into books.

  Karen was starting over in more ways than one. Her first months in Washington were productive. The entire city seemed populated by informed sources eager to leak everything they knew about sensitive topics. She made friends quickly, doing favors for those she courted and getting favors in return.

  Then came the Pinocchio Syndrome. No topic could have been more perfect for her. A worldwide crisis of monstrous proportions, it would spawn dozens of books, perhaps hundreds. She wanted hers to be the first.

  But the inflammatory effect of her article on the Syndrome had made her an overnight pariah among D.C. journalists. Reeling from the setback, she did not know what t
o do next. If she gave up on the Pinocchio story, she would be throwing away many weeks of backbreaking work. If she pursued it, she would be beating her head against a brick wall. In her frustration she drank more than ever. Her hangovers were monumental. But the river of cheap booze running through her veins did not give her an answer.

  Then something happened.

  On a frigid Tuesday night, after a fruitless cocktail conversation with a supervisor at the surgeon general’s office who had formerly been a friend, Karen got home at eight. Tired, she peered into the freezer in search of something to eat. She found a tuna casserole and stuck it into the toaster oven.

  Peeling off clothes as she went, she headed for the shower. On the way she poured herself a stiff bourbon and sat down at the computer in her bra and panties. She got online and checked her e-mail. There were the usual messages from friends, editors, and other reporters.

  A message with an odd title caught her eye.

  PINOCCHIO’S NOSE.

  She clicked on the message and saw a brief e-mail appear on the screen. The return address meant nothing to her.

  The text of the e-mail made her sit up straight.

  I READ YOUR ARTICLE. YOU HAVE GOOD EYES. GOOD ENOUGH TO SEE THAT PINOCCHIO’S NOSE IS GETTING LONGER.

  IF LONELY WRITE TO GRIMM, PERSONALS COLUMN POST.

  Karen sat looking at the message. She took a long sip of her bourbon and set the glass back down. Then she read the message again.

  PINOCCHIO’S NOSE.

  GRIMM.

  Karen did not feel the night air that chilled her scantily clad body. She had forgotten about her shower. She sat with the bourbon in her hand, pensively studying the screen.

  28

  —————

  Gaithersburg, Maryland

  January 18

  SECURITY AT Walter Reed remained tight. Now that Tom Palleschi had fallen ill, public curiosity about the Pinocchio Syndrome was out of control. Palleschi’s whereabouts were classified information, known to only a handful of high-level Washington people. As for Dan Everhardt, he was under twenty-four-hour guard in his hospital room.

  Karen knew she could not get to Palleschi. But Everhardt was another matter. It was time to take risks.

  She arrived at the hospital at 3A .M., wearing a doctor’s scrub suit, a stethoscope, and a name tag that identified her as Dr. Dase. The name tag had cost her a lot of money. It bore the army designations and codes required of all Walter Reed physicians, and a photo of her taken under conditions identical to those of the hospital’s identification photo studio.

  She emerged from the parking lot, moving without hurry despite the cold night air, and breezed through the empty lobby to the elevators. She went up to the fourth floor, where an enlisted man stopped her at the entrance to the ICU.

  “At ease, Private,” she said. “Dr. Dase to see Vice President Everhardt.”

  The enlisted man ran a tired eye down his list of authorized names and found that of Dr. Dase. The presence of her name on the list had cost Karen three times as much as the identification card.

  “Yes, ma’am. The room is—”

  “I know where it is.” Karen nodded to the soldier and moved down the corridor without hurry. She looked like any doctor on call at three in the morning. All business, but not happy to be awake at this hour.

  Everhardt’s room was at the end of the hall, for purposes of privacy as well as comfort. Karen approached it cautiously, surprised to see that there was no guard on the door.

  So much for military efficiency,she said to herself.

  Without knocking she pushed the door open. Everhardt was lying with his eyes closed on a modified hospital bed with an extra-long mattress. The bed must have been chosen to accommodate his height.

  There was a cot by the window. Pam Everhardt, the vice president’s wife, lay asleep, her mouth open wide, snoring gently. Emotional exhaustion made her face look sallow and deeply lined.

  The most striking thing about Everhardt was how much weight he had lost. He looked wasted, skeletal. In the media he had always seemed huge and athletic. Clearly the disease had destroyed his normal metabolism.

  Karen did not need to use her stethoscope to listen to Everhardt’s heart. A monitor against the wall showed a slow, irregular heart rate. Another monitor showed dangerously low blood pressure, with the diastolic well below sixty.

  Looks like I made it in the nick of time,she told herself.

  She moved on tiptoe to the cot where Mrs. Everhardt slept. Something about the woman’s face made Karen suspect she was sedated. It was doubtful that any small sounds Karen made would wake her up. She must be accustomed to a steady stream of physicians in the room.

  Karen moved to the vice president’s bedside. She stood listening to his shallow breathing, alert to telltale sounds from the corridor that would indicate someone was coming. There were none.

  She looked again at the monitors against the wall. One of them showed an EEG that looked severely abnormal to Karen. Another was connected to the IV that led to the vice president’s arm. Karen had never seen one like it.

  Gingerly she pulled back the sheet from his left arm. The mystery line led to a patch attached to the back of the patient’s hand. Monitoring cutaneous circulation, she guessed.

  The hand was visibly deformed. It was at least twice the size of a normal hand, and the skin tone was darkened and unnaturally shiny. Karen touched it gently, recoiling when she felt the chitinous hardness.

  Poor guy. Her heart went out to him, pity eclipsing horror over the grotesque symptoms of the disease. She had seen Everhardt in dozens of interviews. He was a nice, down-to-earth, simple man. He did not deserve this.

  The lump under the sheet at the end of his right arm left little doubt as to the condition of the hand, but she took a look anyway. Then she undid the bottom corners of the sheet and looked at his feet. The distention was significant, but even more striking was the pulling back of the toes toward the heel in a hooflike shape.

  Karen forced herself to feel the hardened skin. She used a penlight to take a closer look at the partially fused digits of the hands and feet. The deformation was identical to that of the victims she had seen in Australia and of the body in New Hampshire. The syndrome was unquestionably the same.

  After another long look at Mrs. Everhardt, Karen removed a tiny camera from the pocket of her scrub suit. It was a Pentax 749, developed specifically for night photography without flash. It bathed the subject in a brief flare of infrared light and produced images that could be corrected by computer enhancement to reproduce natural light. Developed for the intelligence services, it had been discovered by journalists a decade or so ago.

  She took photos of Everhardt’s hands and feet, close up and at a distance of eighteen inches. The shutter was almost completely inaudible, but she hurried her shooting anyway. She finished with a full-length shot of Everhardt, with face, hands, and feet visible. Then she put away the camera and replaced the sheet.

  As she was bending over Everhardt his eyes opened.

  Startled, Karen recoiled. Then she forced herself to bring her face close to his.

  “Mr. Vice President?” she whispered.

  He didn’t answer. His eyes were pointed at her, but they seemed to see past her or through her. This was the look she had seen in Iowa, the inward hypnotized look of the Pinocchio victims.

  “Can you hear me?” she asked. There was no response.

  She rested a hand on his arm, hoping for a flutter of recognition. But the eyes did not focus on her, and there was no indication that he knew she was there.

  “Mr. Everhardt, who did this to you?” Karen asked. There was no response.

  She glanced at his wife. The sleeping woman had heard nothing.

  It was time to go. Karen peeked out of the room. The corridor was empty except for two nurses who were talking quietly at the nurses’ station.

  Karen left the room and went across the corridor to the staircase. She walked down the fo
ur flights to the ground floor. Making notes on her pad like a preoccupied physician, she left the hospital without hurry and walked through the brisk night air to her car.

  Dan Everhardt was a dying man. He was being killed by the Pinocchio Syndrome. The first prominent man in America to fall victim to the disease, he would not be the last.

  Shaking her head, Karen turned the key in the ignition. The Honda coughed into life. It needed a tune-up, she knew.

  But not as much as she needed a drink.

  She eased the little car out of the parking lot and headed through the empty streets toward home.

  29

  —————

  DAN EVERHARDT lay in his bed, his eyes pointed at the soundproofing tiles on the ceiling.

  He could hear his wife snoring softly in her chair. He wished he could call out to her, signal her in some way to come to his side. He felt lonely. More so now that death was approaching.

  The illness had many wrinkles, many resonances. The colors that became flavors, the sounds that coiled around one’s insides like snakes, the memories that flew up suddenly like birds and were lost. These last two months had not been without events for Dan Everhardt, even adventures.

  But the essence of the disease was the separation from those one loved. To hear Pam’s voice and to be unable to acknowledge her, and then to see her move away, crushed by his silence. The children, too, bending over their father to comfort him and be comforted—and then moving away disappointed.

  It was like Scrooge’s visit to his own early life in the company of the Ghost of Christmas Past. Here were the people he loved, close to him, desperate to contact him. And it was he who shut them out.

  Or rather, it was the disease, the monster.

  He wondered who the girl was, just now. She had bent over him like all the others, asking him if he could hear her. Like all the others she had gazed straight into his eyes, giving him a chance to answer. A chance he could not take.