The Syndrome

by John Case

  McBride freed Adrienne, then carefully lifted de Groot’s ID from around the Dutchman’s neck. Put it over his own.

  “It won’t work,” she said. “You don’t look like him.”

  “It’s all I can do!”

  “But—”

  “Call the hotel,” he told her. “See if you can get through. Tell them it’s an emergency. Tell them the fire extinguishers are booby-trapped.” He was at the door. “And get me a lawyer!”

  “But—”

  Then he was out the door and pounding down the stairs to the car.

  It was three miles from de Groot’s flat to Davos Dorp and it took him nearly fifteen minutes to cover the distance, crawling through the traffic, windshield wipers fighting the snow. Even so, he couldn’t get anywhere near the Fribourg—the access roads were in gridlock—so he abandoned the car by the side of the road and broke into a run.

  De Groot’s ID bounced on his chest as he charged up the hill through the slush and the snow. Arriving at a security barricade, he was stopped by a frozen-looking soldier. Waggling the ID, he cursed the cold, complaining loudly in German about having to miss the Wolfsburg Kaiserslautern match—just because someone thought there might be a problem with the fire extinguishers. “It can’t be anything,” he complained. “I just checked them this afternoon.” The soldier peered through the swirling snow at the ID. “De Groot,” he said. “I’ll have to call.”

  A sort of makeshift shelter had been thrown up—a construction of canvas and transparent plastic—and the soldier retreated into this and spoke into his telephone. He tossed McBride an exhausted look, raising his eyebrows as he waited for a reply. It was difficult to wait. McBride kept imagining the round tables of banquet goers, the waiters clearing the plates, the speaker at the head table, checking his watch, sneaking a peek at his notes as he prepared to walk to the podium. The dinner had started at seven. How many courses were there? How long would it take? Relax, he told himself, but a glance at his watch sent his heart into his throat: 7:48.

  Then the soldier poked his head out, and waved him through. McBride took off like a jackrabbit, leaving the soldier calling out with a laugh: “Wo is das feuer?” Where’s the fire, indeed.

  A figure dressed in lederhosen and an alpine cap was fighting a losing battle against the snow accumulating on the red carpet under the porte cochere at the entrance to the Fribourg. Also in sight were a man who looked like an admiral (the doorman as it turned out) and two soldiers. McBride launched himself in their direction, trying to remember the words for ‘Fire security.’ Feuer-something.

  Then he was there. The doorman reached for the door’s brass handle, suddenly frowned, and let his hand drop. One of the security men stepped forward, and took McBride by the arm.

  “Feuersicherheit!” McBride yelled, grabbing de Groot’s badge and jerking it toward the man, then wrenching free of his grip to plunge through the doorway.

  “Stoppen Sie!”

  He was running through the Fribourg’s lobby, surrounded by crystal chandeliers, old wood and plush carpet, looking for a sign for the Ballroom. What’s the German for ‘ballroom’? People were screaming Halt!—which was German for ‘Halt!’—but what was the German for ‘ballroom’? Then he saw the sign:

  BALLROOM

  Three sets of swinging double doors, flanked by testosterone-types in dark suits, with little wires running from their ears. Nearby, a claque of smokers clustered around a standing ashtray, and two ladies in African garb, with elaborate headdresses, made their way toward the restrooms. On a pedestal, a silver-framed sign:

  WORLD ECONOMIC SUMMIT

  SOUTH AFRICA RECEPTION

  Seeing McBride, one of the security guards raised an arm to block the way. But McBride’s impetus carried him past the guards and through the doors before anyone could actually stop him.

  But he was too late.

  The room—with its candlelit tables, and spiky flower arrangements, its white linen and gleaming crystal—was erupting in panic. Or if not panic, horror. Men in tuxedos and women in gowns, a handful of men and women in vibrant tribal costume, were getting to their feet and looking wildly around. The normal hubbub of three hundred diners—the clatter of dishware, the murmur of conversation, the burble of laughter—had given way to a primitive roar. A thin scream arced toward the spangled ceiling and it was as if the crowd was a single beast, with its eyes on the dais, where an elderly black man stood behind a blazing podium, slapping at the flames on his lapels.

  The air was filled with a strange turbulence, a cannonade of gasps and shouts, as McBride sprinted down the aisle. Through the mass of people, he’d seen a waiter trotting toward the dais with a fire extinguisher in his hands.

  “Don’t!” McBride cried out, shaking off a security guard who was tearing at his shoulders—even as the waiter raised the fire extinguisher toward the burning man. Hearing McBride’s shout, the waiter turned as the American bounded onto an empty chair, then onto the table, and launched himself at the dais, taking the waiter down with a flying tackle.

  The fire extinguisher bounced free as McBride clambered to his feet, shouting, “The fire extinguisher’s a bomb! Use your coats!” Tearing his jacket off, he began to slap at the flames, quieting the fire at the podium while another man rescued the speaker. Then someone grabbed him from behind, and jerked, and something crashed against his ear, driving him down to the floor.

  Where he saw patent leather shoes on the blue carpeting—and felt a foot in the middle of his back. The face of one of the security guards appeared in front of him, so close McBride could see the pores in his nose, the stubble on his upper lip.

  “Get everyone out,” McBride shouted, suddenly so light-headed it seemed as if he were about to float away. “The ballroom’s a bomb,” he muttered. “The ballroom’s a bomb.”

  Epilogue

  The only person to visit McBride during the week he spent in the Davos jail was a gentleman from the American embassy in Bern, and he was very straightforward.

  There would be no publicity about the incident at the Hotel Fribourg. Henrik de Groot would be treated for his condition at a private sanitorium in an undisclosed country. Whether the Dutchman was ever to be released would depend upon how much—or how little—he chose to remember.

  Meanwhile, arrangements had been made for McBride to pay a small fine for disturbing the peace at the banquet. He and his “girlfriend” would then be driven to the Zurich airport, where they would be placed on the first American carrier home. As far as the events in Spiez were concerned, cantonal authorities agreed that there was nothing to be gained by a public trial—which could only embarrass both countries.

  “That’s it?” McBride asked.

  His visitor shrugged. “I’m just a messenger,” he told him. “This isn’t my brief. I don’t know the details. But I can tell you this: based on the cables I saw—and the people who signed off on them—there’s only two ways this thing can end.”

  “And what are those?”

  “Well, my personal favorite is ‘happily ever after’—that’s the one we’re shooting for.”

  “Great,” McBride replied. “And what’s the other?”

  “The other? Well, the other is… unhappily ever after. That’s the one where you decide to tell everyone your story. That’s the one where you wind up in a Thorazine coma on the high-risk ward at St. Elizabeth’s.” He paused. “Don’t go there.”

  He didn’t.

  When they finally got back to D.C., Adrienne’s to-do list was three pages long, replete with categories and subcategories. The Odds and Ends section alone—a catchall for relatively trivial matters—had twenty-three items requiring her prompt, if not immediate, attention. These ranged from sorting out liability for the damage to the rented Dodge (finally returned after forty-two days, one paint-blistering fire and a rear-end crash) to reclaiming personal items left in her cubicle at Slough. That would be awkward, but after what she’d been through, she didn’t mind, really. On the cont
rary, she was looking forward to hanging out her own shingle and practicing law, her way.

  But first, she’d have to clean out Nikki’s apartment, go through her belongings. She’d promised the Watermill that she’d have everything out by the end of the month—

  And then, beyond this minor stuff, there was Nikki herself. Nikki’s ashes still reposed in the “classic urn” and Adrienne felt it strongly—the need for some kind of ritual to commemorate her sister’s departure from this earth.

  McBride had his own list and most of it had to do with picking up the severed strands of an interrupted life. There were friends and colleagues—in San Francisco and elsewhere—he needed to get in touch with. He had a career to resume as a research psychologist. And there were dormant bank accounts and a small brokerage account with Merrill Lynch to reclaim. Maybe because he’d lived so close to Silicon Valley, his modest investments had been targeted toward the Internet. He remembered what he’d bought and at what prices; a preliminary look produced the happy news that during his walkabout as Jeff Duran, the value of his shares of Cisco Systems, Intel, and EMC had skyrocketed. He wasn’t rich, but his fifteen grand had multiplied many times.

  Lew couldn’t take the idea of living in the apartment where he’d been “that robot.” So until they figured out what they were going to do and where, they lived in the Bomb Shelter, enduring the disapproval of Mrs. Spears until Lew won her over by cleaning out the gutters, pruning the overgrown pyracantha and repairing her dishwasher.

  “I didn’t know you were so handy,” Adrienne remarked.

  “We were hard up,” he explained, “when I was a kid. We couldn’t afford to hire people to do things.”

  “Well, ditto. But I never learned how to fix anything.”

  “In Maine we pride ourselves on that Yankee can-do attitude.”

  “Can do, huh?” He was sitting on the edge of the bed, unlacing his shoes. She pushed him over onto his back and sprawled on top of him. She lifted herself up and looked down at him. She ran her thumb along his lower lip. “Does that extend to all areas of endeavor?”

  “Absolutely.”

  She kissed him.

  “We’re famous for it,” he said, coming up for air. “We also have Yankee ingenuity.”

  “Do you always talk so much?”

  It finally came to her about two weeks after their return from Switzerland—how to send Nikki off in a style appropriate to her sister’s lively and glamorous spirit.

  She explained the idea to Lew and he helped her find the perfect vessel on the Web, a Challenger model yacht owned by a gentleman named Taz Brown. They communicated first by e-mail, then by telephone. “I hate to give her up,” Brown said, “but my wife says I’ve got to trim the fleet and this one’s named after the first wife.”

  Once a tentative deal had been struck, they coaxed Adrienne’s Subaru back to life and, following Brown’s intricate directions, drove the twenty-five miles to his nouveau brick mansion on the Potomac. The river was thawing, Adrienne saw, as they crossed it on Memorial Bridge; only a few patches of white, snow-crusted ice remained.

  Brown was a dapper fifty-year-old wearing a blue blazer, khakis with a knife crease and tassel loafers. Once they’d introduced each other and Brown had cast a worried look at the scabby Subaru, he led them to the garage to show them the Patricia. The craft—and its siblings—shared space with a pair of Bimmers.

  “It’s big,” McBride said. In fact, the mast was taller than he was.

  “Fifty-seven inches in length, twelve inch beam, mast eighty-five inches from the deck. Comes in two pieces, with a carrying case that ought to fit right on top of your car. Good you’ve got a roof rack.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Adrienne said.

  Brown grunted his concurrence. “Carbon fiber, composite hull—just like the America’s Cup. And it comes with a suit of high-wind sails if you have a taste for ocean racing.”

  Adrienne asked him to demonstrate how to break the boat down and reassemble it, how to attach the keel, and how to operate the electronic controls.

  “You’re getting quite a bargain,” he told her, as she wrote out a check for $1,250. “A new one would cost you five grand.”

  “I know it’s a lot,” Adrienne volunteered as they rattled back toward D.C., “but even the most ‘economical’ coffin would have cost five times as much. And, trust me, Nikki would like this much, much more.”

  The Mount Vernon Parkway is a beautiful twelve-mile stretch of road that follows the shoreline of the Potomac River south of Old Town Alexandria to the bend in the river chosen by George Washington as the site for Mount Vernon. The whole length of the parkway is paralleled by a heavily used bike and footpath and interspersed with parks, marinas, and roadside picnic areas. In nice weather, the riverfront is a lively place, with windsurfers and inexpert groups in canoes sharing the water with pleasure craft. On dry land, picnickers and fishermen share the terrain with joggers and cyclists, and families out for a stroll.

  But it wasn’t nice weather, and it wasn’t daytime, so they had the shoreline entirely to themselves. The moon, fuzzy and indistinct behind the cloud cover, provided some light, but they had also brought powerful flashlights. It only took a few minutes to remove the Patricia from its carrying case and rig it, snapping on the mast, the keel and the rudder. Once it was floating in a protected little cove, Adrienne—fingers freezing—slipped the votive candles into the glass cups she’d affixed to the Patricia’s hull, one fore, one aft, for balance. After that, she settled the dish with Nikki’s ashes in the rectangular depression amidship. Last of all, the flowers. She arranged them—rosebuds and jonquils, lilacs, and Queen Anne’s lace—all around the hull.

  And then it was time to light the candles and send Nikki on her way. Lew worked the radio controls and the boat moved sharply out of the cove. A breeze caught its sails and it began to heel over until he corrected the bearing to “a broad reach.” She’d been a little worried that the weight of the candles and the ashes would make the boat difficult to maneuver, but it didn’t seem to be affected by them. The votive lights winked and flickered, illuminating the white sails in a beautiful way as the boat moved out toward the center of the river. When it reached the channel, Lew maneuvered the sails so that it began to run before the wind. The tide was going out, the wind southerly—they’d checked beforehand.

  “Bon voyage,” Adrienne whispered, her hand raised in farewell.

  Lew dropped the electronic control box into the carrying case, then put his arm around Adrienne. It was all up to the wind now, and to the water. The craft was moving nicely and within a few minutes, they could not see the hull or the candles at all, only the occasional, ghostly white of the sail as the craft rose up on a swell, only to fall back again. Lew put his arm around Adrienne’s shoulder, and they stood together like that, in the freezing darkness at the edge of the shore, watching the sail wink out to sea on the black water.

  And then, even that was gone.

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  John Case, The Syndrome