Box Nine

by Jack O'Connell

  Standing next to Welby, looking cocky and impatient, is Lehmann, a Federal cop out of DEA that Lenore has dealt with once before. Once was enough. Lehmann is old-school and not too crazy about women working narcotics. He’s wearing a blue standard-issue windbreaker and jeans, holding his aviator sunglasses in his hands and chewing on the end of one stem.

  The third person is a mystery man. He’s the tallest Oriental Lenore has ever seen. She’d put him at six two or three. He looks to be in his mid to late thirties, 175 pounds, all of it tight. Could be a runner, maybe even a marathoner. He’s got a closely cropped head of jet-black hair and a long angular face. He’s dressed in charcoal slacks, a pale blue button-down shirt, a navy knit tie, and a herringbone jacket. Lenore looks to his feet and proves herself right—he’s got on penny loafers.

  The guy is carrying a faded leather satchel that bulges slightly in the middle, and as she watches he shifts it from his hand up into his arms to cradle it like a sleeping child. She can’t really guess at his specific nationality. He could be Chinese, Korean, Cambodian. She’s just awful at making the distinctions, even though the Asian population of Quinsigamond has grown tremendously in the past ten years and she knows dozens of Asians personally. She’s embarrassed by this weakness, but doesn’t know how you might effectively cure it. Is there a reference book you could work with?

  Zarelli touches her arm and she pulls away at once and moves to the table to sit down between Shaw and Richmond. Mayor Welby sits down in the head seat, Miskewitz on his left and Peirce on his right. The Oriental guy sits down next to the lieutenant. Lehmann takes the end-seat opposite the mayor, and Zarelli slides into the remaining seat.

  Miskewitz sits forward and says, “All right, people, I thank you for coming in this morning for this briefing, especially considering how some of you finished up work a few hours ago. Mayor Welby has a few things to say to you.” He sinks back into his chair, clearly uncomfortable with this event.

  But the mayor picks up with a casual grace. First he smiles all around the table, lingering, a second too long, Lenore thinks, on Peirce. Then he folds his hands in front of him and says, “Well, you all know who I am. This is Officer Lehmann out from the Boston office of the DEA. Some of you have met him before, I believe. And I’d like to introduce you all to Dr. Frederick Woo, on loan to us today from St. Ignatius, where he’s a lecturing fellow in linguistics and language theory. Have I got that correct, Fred?”

  The Oriental guy smiles and gives a small, modest nod.

  The mayor continues, “I know that right now you’re all wondering why a bureaucrat is here to waste your valuable time battling what often, I’m sure, seems like an unwinnable situation on our city streets. I wish I could tell you I’m here to bring you some good news”—his voice drops—“but I’m afraid that’s not the situation today.”

  He slides his chair back from the table and stands, a little too dramatically. He walks over to the windows that Lenore hates, and gazes outside for a moment, then returns to start a slow, awful pace, in a circle around the table. Lenore can tell Miskewitz hates every second of this.

  “I suppose,” the mayor says, “I’m here today as a symbol more than anything else, a suggestion to you of how serious a problem situation we’re in.”

  Lenore wonders why the man can’t just say what’s going on. Why does everything have to have a prologue? Why do guys like Welby always have to turn on the dramatics?

  “It’s no secret that over the past two years, drug traffic in Quinsigamond has increased geometrically. I’ve got the papers on my desk that prove it. You people don’t need to see papers. You see the real thing, every day, walking around the muck of Bangkok Park.”

  Lenore is cringing inside, caught in a spasm between laughter and disgust. What a pathetic actor this guy is. And what an asshole. She thinks he’s taken his dialogue, heart and soul, straight from some low-rent B movie where self-righteous, renegade, vigilante cops fight ethnic, satanic dealers who lurk in the shadows of schoolyards.

  “You are an underfunded, understaffed group of civil servants attempting, no, let’s be honest, staking your lives in a battle against what has become in just a few short decades one of our largest, most intricate and ruthless multinational industries. To be frank, people, you are in an absurd situation.”

  He takes a breath, comes behind his own chair, grips the back of it like the conference table was a speeding ride in an amusement park.

  “And detectives,” he says in a fake-tired voice, “things just got worse.”

  He pauses and looks around the table as if he were waiting for people to audibly sigh. No one obliges and he sits back down in his head chair and continues.

  “Now, I am not here today to break down what minimal morale you have left. But it is my duty to let you know about the extent of the problem we’re about to face. And I want each and every one of you to feel that we’re facing it together. You have my unlimited support in this effort. We can’t pull any punches here, ladies and gentlemen. The time for polite conversation is long over.”

  Lenore wants to lean over the man, scream at him in the same manner she’s grilled dozens of informants and suspects. She wants to be less than an inch from his face, take in a lungful of air, and yell, “Cut the bullshit and tell me what you know.”

  “I’m sure I sound melodramatic to some of you. But what you’ll soon hear about today is a worse plague than the crack explosion we suffered two summers ago. Worse than that heroin harvest out of Burma in the fall of …” he trails off, looking to the ceiling for the year.

  “Eighty-three,” Miskewitz mutters, and Lenore knows he’s thrown out a random year.

  “Eighty-three,” the mayor repeats. “It’s a different animal this time, people.”

  He takes a long pause for an effect that just doesn’t pan out and says, “At this point I think it’s best to turn the story over to Agent Lehmann.”

  Lehmann stays seated, but tosses his sunglasses out in front of him, like he’s tired of talking before he’s even begun.

  “The substance Mayor Welby is talking about is a derivative of methyl-sermocilan. You’ll come to know it more commonly as ‘Lingo,’ the label Dr. Woo has given it.”

  Lehmann speaks like a man in a constant, simmering rage over having to walk among inferior people. He slaps a manila folder onto the table and opens it.

  “These look familiar to anyone?” he asks, tossing a pile of 8 x 10 black-and-white photos onto the middle of the table. Everyone reaches for a picture. Lenore pulls up a full-body picture of a naked woman, laid out faceup on a silver slab, photographed from above. Even in black and white, maybe more so in black and white, she has that pasty but shadowy look of the dead. There are thick welts and contusions across her abdomen. The standard tag dangles from her toe in the corner of the photo.

  Richmond looks over her shoulder and says, “Last week’s murder-suicide up on Grimaldi Drive. Domestic bloodbath. The Swanns, right? He slit her throat and hung himself. Or do I have it backward?”

  “You don’t have it at all,” Lehmann says. “Try to follow me on this. About six months back, some of my people based in Boston were asked to put a file together on a married couple, Leo and Inez Swann. Late thirties, both supposedly brilliant, degrees from Princeton, Cornell, and MIT, where they met. They lived here in the Windsor Hills section of Quinsigamond. Money spilling out of both their pockets. They worked, until recently, at the Institute for Experimental Biochemistry. They had a specialty that the doctor here can tell you more about—”

  The Oriental guy, Woo, takes this as a signal to speak, though it’s clear to everyone else that it’s not.

  “The Swanns were working on advanced drug therapy for treatment of what is termed ‘language delayed’ children.”

  Lehmann rolls his eyes.

  “Sounds a little off your beat,” Lenore says.

  Lehmann shrugs, still looking at Woo, trying to make it clear that he screwed up, that he’ll let him know when it�
�s his turn to speak. “Like everything else it was strictly accidental. The FBI was doing some standard mob-sitting down San Remo Ave. Had a wire on a midlevel errand boy of Gennaro Pecci. Gennaro and his men go to dinner one night down Fiorello’s Restaurant.”

  Lenore can’t help but look over at Zarelli, who’s staring, unblinking, at Lehmann.

  “And who are the Don’s dinner guests but the Drs. Swann.”

  Richmond states the obvious for everyone. “Unusual pairing.”

  Lehmann gives an indulgent smile back at him and goes on. “The wire gave us nothing. They didn’t discuss a damn thing of interest. The weather. Recent vacations. Local politics.”

  Mayor Welby snaps into a practiced smile and says, “Should I call a lawyer, Al?”

  “Everyone agrees it was a size-’em-up meet. Both parties get a chance to feel each other out. Make an introduction. Establish contacts. Once the bureau got confirmation on the identity of the Swanns, they called us.”

  “You think the Swanns were considering a mid-life career change,” Peirce says.

  “Or at least a new sideline. There’s definitely a precedent for chemical whiz kids like Leo and Inez turning a good dollar by leasing themselves out.”

  “Mob chemists,” the lieutenant says.

  Lehmann nods. “Big demand for synthetic kicks lately. Big upswing. I’ve got the numbers. More controllable than run-of-the-mill organic crap. No importation problems. Chemical coke. Supertranqs, designer things.”

  “I’m just saying,” Miskewitz says, “two Ivy League yuppies from Windsor Hills seem like a little stretch.”

  Lehmann gets annoyed. “Today’s labs, Lieutenant, are a hell of a lot more complicated than they were just three years back. But more importantly, it’s unlikely the Swanns were dining at Fiorello’s for the lasagna.”

  It’s a line that would only come out of the TV and Lenore hates Lehmann for saying it. But Miskewitz shuts up and Lehmann goes on.

  “A month after the dinner meeting with Pecci, the Swanns resign their positions at the Institute. There were a lot of bad feelings. A lot of interoffice politics. A lot of fighting over grant money and allocations. The Swanns broke off and rented office space at the new industrial park up near the airport.”

  “Place is a ghost town,” Richmond says. “Developer’s supposed to go Chapter Eleven any day now.”

  “I don’t think Leo and Inez were too interested in neighbors. They set up shop as consultants. They tried to make contacts with the bigger pharmaceutical boys. They called themselves Synaboost Inc.”

  “You’re saying,” Zarelli tries, “that they were going through the motions. That the real contact was down San Remo with Pecci and family.”

  Lehmann ignores him for some reason. “Anything bother you about those photos?” he asks the table in general.

  Lenore tosses her photo back onto the original pile and says, in a bland, bored voice, “Nobody’s throat is cut.”

  Richmond sits up in his chair and looks toward Miskewitz. “I swear homicide said a cut throat. I had lunch with Berkman. ‘Cut throat,’ he says.”

  “Some facts about the Swann case,” Mayor Welby says, “have been altered.”

  “Within the department?” Richmond says, showing too much concern. Lenore feels like sliding a note to him that reads, Shut up now.

  “Both bodies,” Lehmann says, “were found hanging. The housecleaner called police when she couldn’t get in on the second day in a row. Both bodies were tortured extensively, in very particular ways, before they were hung. The FBI was notified and the domestic dispute story was cooked up immediately.”

  He pauses, reaches down, and shuffles the photos back into an ordered pile. “We’ve seen the method of execution before. Definitely gangland. Definitely immigrant. There’s some dispute as to whether we’re talking Hong Kong or Panama.”

  He pauses again, like he’s learned an important lesson from Welby, then says, “The tongues were cut out of both their heads. My people came in on the heels of the bureau. We sent a team in, sealed off the house, and spent two days combing it over. We found two of these”—he reaches into his windbreaker pocket—“hidden inside a spice jar labeled ‘garlic salt.’”

  He pulls from his pocket a small plastic ball, like a bubble, like one of those clear round containers found in the candy-dispenser machines at discount stores. Sealed inside it and held solidly in place by some kind of clear gel, is a small, scarlet-colored pill, cut in the shape of the letter Q. Lehmann places the bubble on the table and gives it a roll. All their eyes follow it as it spins down an awkward, wobbly path and finally drops off the table’s edge and into Lenore’s lap.

  She looks around the table at everyone, then picks it up, weighs it in her hand, holds it up close to her eyeball like it was a jeweler’s loupe. Whatever the gel is inside the bubble, it makes everything she sees seem hyper-clear, more colorful, solid, more real than her normal vision. She turns her head till she’s looking at Zarelli’s pleading, anxious face popping from the knifelike collar of his shirt. She pulls the bubble away, places it back on the table, and gives it a small push. It rolls across to Dr. Woo, who lets it drop over the edge into his waiting palm.

  As if taking this as a cue, Lehmann says, “The doctor can give you some idea of what’s inside the container,” and starts wiping the lenses of his sunglasses on the fleecy inside of his jacket.

  Dr. Woo nods and puts the bubble back on the table in front of him and stabilizes it with his hand. It sits like some weird egg, some freak produced by a marriage of nature and technology. He lifts his satchel onto the table and takes out a stack of papers that he hands to Miskewitz, indicating that they should be passed around. Each handout has a couple dozen pages. The lieutenant takes one for himself and hands them down the table.

  Lenore takes her copy and thumbs through it. The printing is too small, she thinks, it’d give anyone a headache by page two. There are also graphs, charts, columns of numbers, and illustrations. The last page is filled with a large and very intricate picture of a brain. The page is crammed with writing and dozens of black lines that stretch between areas of the brain and definitions of what the areas are called. Lenore thinks the odds are pretty good that she won’t read a single word. If the doc can’t give her the basics in conversation, he’s in trouble. She’s got a backlog of reading of her own at home, stuff that could refine the direction of her life, give her even more of an edge than she’s already got.

  Dr. Woo prepares to speak by making his hand into a fist, bringing it up in front of his mouth, and forcing himself to cough a few times. Lenore interprets this to mean that he’ll speak too softly and be a boring pain in the ass. But as soon as the first words flow from his mouth, she knows she’s completely wrong. He’s got a beautiful speaking voice, low, distinct, strong but rich with hints of emotion and emphasis.

  “As Mayor Welby said, my name is Frederick Woo, and I’ve been asked to come here today for two reasons. First, to try to give you a brief and intelligible explanation of what the small red pill that you see inside this capsule can do to the human brain. And second, because I consulted briefly with Leo and Inez Swann during their tenure with the Institute.”

  He gives this sly, almost mischievous grin, and stares directly at Lenore. For a second, it seems like he’s got nothing more to say, but then he slaps the table with a flat palm and, without taking his eyes off her, continues.

  “Well, let’s give it a shot.” He reaches into his satchel again, like a magician going for a rabbit, and he pulls out a plastic model of a brain. Like the kind you’d see in some high school science class, all color-coded and with parts that can be removed. It’s about the size of a softball, maybe a little smaller. Woo puts it out on the table in front of him and Lenore thinks it suddenly resembles a small pet, something the doctor needs for companionship.

  “I was formally trained as a specialist in linguistics, then took a detour at the end of my training and went back to square one to get a second
degree in neuropsychology. This,” and he places his long index finger on the top of the model brain, “is where those two fields intersect. What I’ve been asked to do this morning is quite impossible. So let’s get started.”

  He leans forward, places his whole hand over the top of the brain, and begins to talk rapidly and in a friendly, joking manner.

  “Okay. We’ve all got one of these, I’m pretty sure. It’s a very useful piece of equipment. There’s a lot we don’t know about it. A lot we thought we knew that was proved wrong. We guess a lot about this organ. I personally think it scares us a bit. Because so many answers are buried inside it. And we don’t know if those answers will free us up, prove us to be the supermen we really secretly hope we are. Or if the answers will limit us, show us to be animals that know a lot of impressive parlor tricks and little more.”

  He takes his hand off the brain and points to a specific area on the left side of the model.

  “This little town here is called the anterior speech cortex. That’s its official name. You, like me, can call it Broca’s area. It’s a hell of a town. Got quite a little industry going here. But, you know, like any growing industry, every now and then you have some kind of rough industrial accident …”