by David Linzee
“Sir, I have no right to give a person like you advice. But I have been in situations like this before, and you probably haven’t.”
“I don’t think anyone has been in a situation like this before,” said Bryson bitterly.
“I just mean a situation where, uh, an objective has to be attained.”
“All right. Give me your advice.”
“Just this. These things you’re not prepared to do? Better start preparing.”
Chapter 61
It was a short flight to Chicago, and the airlines assigned mini-jets to the route. The plane was cramped and noisy. Patel told her tale across the aisle to Renata, and in the far seat Peter. She spoke softly, seeming to find this a difficult story to bring out, and Peter had to lean uncomfortably forward and sideways to hear. There were frequent annoying breaks as flight attendants or passengers walked down the aisle between them. Unregarded out the windows, the flat green landscape of Illinois spread out 30,000 feet below.
“I feel so disloyal, telling you about this,” Patel began. “Helen was a wonderful person. She did nothing that men in her position haven’t been doing for years.”
“Feminist point taken, Doctor,” said Renata. “A woman has just as much right to be a ruthless bastard as a man. Now let’s proceed.”
“We were freshly minted PhDs, postdocs working in Helen’s lab. Jeff was a nice enough guy, but difficult. Brilliant and driven. Wound really tight. I guess we all were. It’s an amazing feeling, being in a lab that’s close to a great discovery. You know you may never have such an opportunity again. Helen was a wonderful mentor to me. She was the opposite to Jeff.”
“What did he have to do with the chaperon?”
“A lot.” Patel’s brow was cleft as she mentally translated the scientific terminology. “He headed the team that isolated the chaperon that escorts the pilus subunits to assembly. He set it up as the target for our vaccine.”
“But that was the whole ball game, wasn’t it?”
Patel gave him a tolerant smile. “Your department specializes in simplifying scientific research, Peter from PR. There were many, many other problems to be solved to create the vaccine. And that was the difficulty. Jeff wanted to publish his part right away. Helen told him to hold back until she was ready. If he gave away that key part to the entire world, one of her competitors might beat her to the vaccine.”
“How long did she tell him to wait?”
“It was always a few months more. A science project goes slowly, but the lives of individuals move quickly. His stint as a postdoc with her was drawing to a close. He was applying for faculty positions. That publication would have done him a lot of good. He felt he deserved the credit, and he did. But Helen was the boss. I could see both their points of view. I was trying to keep the peace, which wasn’t easy. Jeff turned very bitter toward Helen.”
“He let her know it?”
Patel nodded “Threats were exchanged. He was going to wreck her project. She was going to wreck his career. He really did believe that she was sabotaging him when he went on interviews. I don’t believe that. I just think everybody could see the chip on his shoulder and didn’t want to hire him.
“He ended up in a diagnostic lab in Chicago. Dealing with blood tests and urine samples. He was off the map as far as Helen and everyone who mattered was concerned. But I tried to keep in touch by email.
“When our paper was in final preparation for publication in Nature, I found out Helen had left him off the list of authors. I told her that was unjust. She had to include him … it was really the biggest fight we ever had. But she said there were always too few people who could be authors, of the many who’d worked on a project. The distinction had to be kept for those who had promising academic careers, and Jeff didn’t.”
“Pretty cold.”
“Yes. It was. I don’t know how he took it. He stopped responding to my emails and calls. Finally I made inquiries at his lab, and they told me they’d had to let him go because he’d become unreliable. They thought he was using drugs.”
“And Helen?”
“I thought she’d forgotten him. Then, just a few months ago, we were passing in a corridor and out of the blue she asked if I’d heard from him. I told her he was working for the lab in Chicago. Not that he’d been fired or why. I don’t know who I was trying to protect—her or him. She asked me to email his contact information. And that was the last I heard.”
“She felt guilty?” asked Peter.
“Yes. I think she did.”
“But not terribly guilty,” said Renata. “She didn’t actually contact him.”
“Until she happened to find herself in Chicago. True.”
“So she said to herself, as long as I’m here for an evening, I’ll go see Jeff and make it up to him. Put his life back on track,” said Peter.
“She’d have been perfectly confident that she could do it. You have no idea how much power somebody like Helen had in academic medicine. She could make a call and get a job.”
“Not for an unemployed drug addict.”
“No. But I hadn’t told her that Jeff had gone off the deep end. She didn’t know what she was walking into, and it was my fault.”
The intercom came to life, and the pilot announced that they were beginning their descent into Chicago.
Chapter 62
The sun was in the west and the overcast was thickening as Schaefer and Bryson drove through Joliet. Countless lights shone through the drifting clouds of white smoke around a sprawling oil refinery of spindly towers and labyrinthine pipes, a foretaste of the great city’s skyline half an hour to the north. Crossing a bridge over a canal, Schaefer accelerated, moving closer through heavier traffic to the gray Saturn.
Lanes multiplied, “exit only” signs flew past overhead, and the lanes disappeared toward other destinations. The Saturn bore on toward downtown Chicago. Bryson was becoming more agitated. He gripped the belt across his chest with both hands and twisted it. Schaefer took off his sunglasses and narrowed his eyes, watching the Saturn.
Traffic slowed as they passed vast warehouses. Their lane turned into an exit, forcing them to shift behind a truck that blocked their view of the Saturn entirely. Bryson leaned forward, as if a few inches would make a difference in his view of tires, mud flaps, and glowing brake lights. Schaefer sat back comfortably, holding the wheel at quarter to three.
Spotting a half-car-length gap opening to his left, he spun the wheel and stamped on the gas. The Porsche Cayenne swung neatly into the lane as the car behind bleated in protest. They crawled, a little more quickly than the lane beside them, moving up alongside the truck until they inched ahead and the Saturn was in view once more. Traffic loosened up and began to move faster, and they slid in behind the Saturn again. Schaeffer allowed a car in between them.
“Sir?” said Schaefer, breaking a silence that had gone on for forty minutes, “Can you keep your head down, please? I’m worried about him seeing your face.”
“Aren’t you giving him too much credit? It hasn’t entered his mind he’s being followed.”
“I don’t know what’s entered his mind. But his driving’s been kinda squirrelly.”
Bryson obeyed, ducking his head. The highway was urban now, running between sloping concrete walls. Big, bright signs advertised radio stations and restaurants. Far off to the left they had occasional glimpses of the Loop, its more famous skyscrapers becoming recognizable.
“Not much longer now,” murmured Bryson.
As if, even in his reduced circumstances, Bryson could still order events, the Saturn’s right taillight began to blink. It shifted from lane to lane. Schaefer matched the movements. By now Bryson was chewing his bearded lower lip.
The exit lane, curving up to an overpass, was solid with cars. Still on the highway, the Saturn reached the end of the line and stopped dead. Two other cars had fallen in behind him by the time Schaefer steered over and braked.
“This’ll take a while,” said Schaefer. He set the handbrake a
nd took his feet off the pedals, his hands off the wheel. He shifted in the seat, rolling his head, flexing his fingers, efficiently wringing the tension from his body. He had been trained for long periods of immobile waiting followed by sudden action.
Even so, he was taken by surprise. The Saturn pulled onto the shoulder and accelerated past the motionless cars in the traffic lane.
“Shit!” Bryson yelled. Schaefer grabbed the controls and rotated the wheel and with a squeak of tires went after the Saturn. By luck or by design it reached the top of the ramp just as the light changed. The intersection was fleetingly clear and the Saturn veered left across it, cutting off the first cars in the line and earning furious horn blasts as it accelerated down the street.
Seconds later, when Schaefer reached the intersection, there was no room to get through. He could only turn right and go in the opposite direction. He punched the accelerator so the Porsche shot ahead of the car to the left, swept the mirrors with a glance, and wrenched the wheel. Tires squealing, the Porsche swerved across the road in a U-turn and returned to the highway overpass. The traffic signal was against Schaefer but he went through it anyway, earning more honks.
“Shut up,” muttered Bryson at the indignant drivers.
Lurching and swerving, the Porsche picked its way through traffic. The Saturn came into view, half a block ahead.
“There he is!” said Bryson. “Good work!”
“No. He’s made us for sure.” Schaefer kept closing, cutting off one last honking truck to get in the lane directly behind the Saturn, feet from its bumper. They could see the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror.
Bryson braced himself against the dashboard. He was expecting the driver to pull into the left lane and accelerate. But he didn’t do that.
The Saturn drove along with the heavy traffic for a couple of blocks, until it came to a small shopping center. It pulled into the parking lot and stopped. The kid got out.
Schaefer pulled in behind and jumped out of the Porsche, which was blocking a truck that was trying to back out of the space. A man leaned out and shouted in Spanish. Ignoring him, Schaefer watched the kid. He was approaching a crowd of boys lounging in front of the 7-Eleven. Homebound from school, with heavy backpacks and pants drooping below their underwear, they were guzzling Slurpees and chewing Slim Jims. The kid picked his way unhurriedly through them and entered the store. Schaefer bent down to speak to Bryson.
“Sir, I need you.”
But Bryson, chin sunk to collar, was trying to hide under the visor of his ball cap. “No. Somebody’ll recognize me.”
“I’m going in. You gotta go around, see if there’s a back door.”
Bryson looked furtively at the lolling teenagers. “I can’t.”
Schaefer ran across the lot. The truck driver was out of his vehicle, calling after him. Schaefer moved overhand like a swimmer through the teenagers and flung the door open.
Inside an alarm was shrilling. A line of customers stood at an unmanned cash register, craning their necks and looking toward the back of the store. Schaefer ran that way.
At the end of the aisle a stack of soda cans was half-knocked over and cans were rolling in every direction. Behind a counter, a door stood open on an alley. A store clerk and a security guard were looking out the door. Schaefer was just in time to glimpse the kid, running flat-out down the alley, turning a distant corner. Schaefer leapt the counter. The guard swung around, blocked his way, and gave Schaefer a warning look. The clerk was pulling the door closed. It latched and the alarm ceased, giving way to a hubbub of talk and laughter. Schaefer turned around, vaulted the counter, and ran out of the store.
Outside the truck driver was leaning in the window of the Porsche Cayenne. In a mix of Spanish and English he was imploring Bryson to move. Bryson was slumping and hunching, raising his arms to cover his head. He looked like a man who had stumbled onto a hornet’s nest. Seeing Schaefer approach he said, “Get me out of here!”
Schaefer swallowed an exasperated reply with a visible tremor of cheek and throat. “Sure, no problem. Except we lost him. We got to hope the disk’s at Bistouri’s office.”
Chapter 63
They took a cab in from O’Hare, Peter up front with the driver, Renata and Patel in back. The driver was telling Peter about the Chicago Cubs’ latest loss to the St. Louis Cardinals. Peter was one of those approachable people, Renata thought. Not like her at all. His face radiated affability and competence. In Lambert and O’Hare, hurrying as they were, they’d been stopped by people asking Peter questions, which he paused to answer.
How many trains of thought, how many contradictory emotions, the mind was able to process at the same time. Even as she was wondering what they would find at their destination, turning over all Patel had told them on the plane, there was still one track in her mind for Peter. Her feeling for him was growing steadily, and she was avid to know everything about him.
Patel was silent through the drive. She had a slip of paper with Jeff Csendes’s address pinched between index finger and thumb. Renata, being given to compunction herself, knew what Patel was feeling. Having dismissed worries about Jeff she should have acted on long before this, she was now over-eager, and afraid that it was too late.
Renata looked around. She didn’t know Chicago at all. From the wide, busy expressway, the flatness of the land and the soaring height of the center-city skyscrapers distorted her sense of distance. It was like approaching a mountain across a plain: they seemed to be driving quickly toward downtown without getting any closer. The driver flicked his signal and eased onto an exit ramp.
They descended to a street lined with parking lots behind chain-link fences and old, blank-walled factories and warehouses. On a steel bridge they crossed a river, its rocky banks and black waters choked with rubbish, jolted over railway tracks and passed more warehouses. Then the street narrowed and they were passing between terraces—row houses, she mentally corrected herself—old, worn buildings, some with little barbed-wire barriers between upper windows, others scrawled with graffiti. It was late afternoon, and the sidewalks were busy. It was always startling, when she left St. Louis with its empty sidewalks, to see pedestrians again. Here was the usual big-city mix of races and ages and sizes: an old lady in bulging stretch pants rolling a trolley full of grocery bags, lovers entwined against a street lamp, each talking on a cellphone, two cops standing together, laughing, with a morose black man sitting on the curb at their feet.
The cab pulled into a space between parked cars at the curb and stopped. Swaying forward, Renata felt her heartbeat pick up and stomach tighten. They were here. She glanced at Patel’s dark, craggy face. Her eyes looked enormous, her lips compressed. The women got out as Peter paid the driver. They were in front of a brick apartment building. It wasn’t tall, five stories, but looking to right and left, they saw that it took up the entire block. Even on a warm May afternoon, it made you think of winter. The color of the bricks suggested they were made of ashes and mud.
They went under a low, broad entrance archway into a courtyard where children were playing around parked cars. There were double doors with wired-glass windows, covered with warnings and notices. Next to them was a panel of doorbells. Patel bent over to read them and pressed Jeff’s. They waited. A young Latina holding a little girl by the hand used her key to open the door and went through, pulling it shut quickly behind her to prevent them from following.
Patel tried again. After a minute, she shook her head. Peter said, “I’ll get the super” and walked across the courtyard. Another thing Renata had noticed about him was that he knew how to do all sorts of practical things, like where to find the super of a strange building. In a moment he was back, leading a short, pear-shaped man in bib overalls.
“You been calling B-two eighteen and he don’t answer?” he said to Patel. “For how long?”
“It’s a day and a half now.”
“You tried his cellphone?”
“I don’t know it.”
&n
bsp; “Maybe he’s just out. Keep trying.” He turned away.
Peter said, “I’d hate to think Jeff skipped out on the rent.”
The super looked at him, then turned to open the door. The tile floor was worn down to cement in many places. They climbed a narrow stairway filled with smells of cooking and sounds of television. A short way down the corridor was the door marked B-218. The super knocked loudly, and without waiting for an answer pulled a big key ring off his belt and opened the door.
The apartment was dark, warm, and musty. Patel walked in a few steps, calling Jeff’s name. The super switched the ceiling light on. The apartment was only one room, plus a bathroom Patel looked into and shook her head. Jeff wasn’t here. The few sticks of furniture and appliances looked undisturbed, except that a small rug lay rumpled on the linoleum floor. Peter walked over and pulled it flat with his foot. Patel gasped at the wide, red-brown stain.
Peter took out his phone and touched in 911.
Chapter 64
The siren fluted, shrill and thin, through the rush-hour clamor of traffic. Cars and trucks didn’t pull over and stop, but gave way grudgingly as the white police car, lights flashing, horn braying, passed them. It bounced on its springs as it landed on the steel plate of the bridge over the river and raced away. A pedestrian who had been standing with his back to the roadway turned. It was Shane. He walked on, in the direction the police car had gone.
People were giving him second glances as he passed. His eyes were unnaturally wide and he was muttering to himself. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt that revealed the tattoo that swirled up his left arm. As soon as he was off the bridge, he stepped into an alley and dug a container from his jeans pocket. He shook pills out and popped them in his mouth, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his scrawny neck as he swallowed.
He continued on his way. Either the more crowded sidewalk made him feel less conspicuous or the drug worked very fast, because in a few minutes his pace slowed and he ceased muttering. Another police car went by. Its lights were flashing but the siren wasn’t on. It passed and Shane watched it cross the intersection and turn a corner. His eyes narrowed. At the curb he stopped, though he had the walk sign. He stood still for a minute, thinking hard. Then he followed the police car.