by Dick Cluster
“Gordon Kramer?”
“Yeah. Is he there, is he back from wherever he was?”
“No, I don’t think so. He had an interview in Florida about a job, some HMO. He arranged time off so he could stay down through the weekend. The FBI asked about him already. I guess they talked to him. Anyway, I know they said he did make his interview yesterday.”
“When you said it was high-risk, being Jay’s protégé, did you mean anything specific about him?”
“About Gordon? Well, only that a lot of people thought Jay would take him on as a fellow next year, but Jay didn’t. He’s getting a guy from Stanford. He decided, just between you and I, that Gordon wasn’t serious enough about patient care. That’s what I meant. Why? I mean, how come you’re asking this?”
“Because I think Kramer knew the woman that was killed.” He still didn’t want to reveal that he’d seen Kramer in the bar, that he knew Kramer wasn’t in Florida late last night. “How did he take the rejection, would you say, when Jay decided not to take him on?”
“Not too bad. The writing was already on the wall, though, by that time. After Jay didn’t take him to Las Vegas. He was mad then. From then on he seemed to take it in good grace. Some of them act like it’s the end of the world if they don’t get the residency or the fellowship they want. Like they’ll never get to play with the big boys now. Gordon didn’t seem that way, from what I saw.”
“Las Vegas?” Alex asked.
“That’s where the national heme-onc meetings were. Hematology-oncology. If a resident is part of an important research team that’s presenting a paper— oh, you know, it’s like a sophomore getting invited to go party with juniors or seniors, it’s a sign you’re considered mature, or sexy, or something like that. What are you getting at, Alex? You think Gordon Kramer stole bone marrow to get back at Jay, sour grapes?”
“I don’t know. I’m not ready to rule Jay out, or that they could be involved in this together. I want to talk with Kramer. Do you know where he is in Florida? Can you give me his home address and phone too?”
33. I Invented You
Alex remembered a conversation between himself and Maria, when she must have been two or three or four, those years that all blurred together now. They’d been at a fast-food place in a mall, the Meadow Glen in Medford, he thought. They must have been on an expedition to buy her clothes. Mostly as an experiment Alex had made a comment about the black woman at a table across the room. He’d said, “Do you like the boots she’s wearing, that black woman sitting over there?”
It wasn’t that he’d wanted to call Maria’s attention to the divides and oppressions of race, if she didn’t know about them yet. Rather, he’d wanted to know how much if anything she’d picked up on her own. A while later Maria had screwed up her nose in a signal of thought and said, “Kim is a black woman?” Alex had just said no and let it drop. Kim was white-skinned with dark, nearly black hair, which meant that Maria hadn’t yet understood that these distinctions were made on the basis of skin. Kim did have a minority status, but it was invisible, and anyway, Alex had been sure Maria didn’t yet know what a lesbian was.
By mutual consent, Alex and Foster had let the matter of their different races hang unmentioned— except for the doughnuts, perhaps. They’d operated on the tacit assumption that the kidnapper had thought the most effective red herring would be one with dark skin. They’d operated on another tacit assumption, which was that they’d do their work together here and then go back to their largely separate worlds. They’d speculated and made plans as if, between them, there weren’t any special fears or suspicions at work. By and large this was how European-Americans and African-Americans got along, to the very limited extent that they did.
As a piece of their partnership, Alex navigated while Foster drove. If Foster knew Boston, he wasn’t letting on. The car had Massachusetts plates, license number 897DFH, which Alex had committed to memory. But the plates might have been borrowed. So, despite Alex’s Gauloise intuition, might the car. His speculations about the location of Foster’s new life had wandered from Brooklyn to Harlem to Bridgeport to New Haven to Buffalo and points west. From the Southeast Expressway, Alex navigated them in via Morton Street and the Jamaica Way, a route that took them through the southern reaches of Boston’s black community and then retraced parts of the way he’d come as a squatter in Deborah’s car and also the way he’d followed Jay. The route led to Coolidge Corner in Brookline. That was where Deborah had said Gordon Kramer lived. The address turned out to be an apartment building on a residential block off Harvard Street, about midway between the bagel bakery and the birthplace of JFK.
Outside the entrance, at the end of a short sidewalk, stood a cluster of retirees, short men in bright colored polyester slacks and zippered jackets and cloth caps with brims that snapped. The old white men looked at Foster coming down the path, looked away, and seemed to shrink backward and downward. Alex pressed the bell marked Kramer, which had no companion name. They’d thought of calling in advance but turned down the idea. If he was home, they wanted surprise.
The speaker grille crackled unintelligibly. Alex hovered between “Gordon” and “Dr. Kramer.”
“Yo, Doc,” Foster said.
The speaker crackled again, something that might have been “who is it?”
“Yo, Doc. My name is Foster.”
“…don’t know who you are,” the box said. The words came slower and louder, though still nearly lost in static.
“Foster. I want to talk to you about Jay Harrison. I can’t explain all that through this goddamn machine.”
Yeah, Alex thought, but Kramer could quickly decide to run out the back door, or worse. Kramer might be only a cog in all this. On the other hand he might be sitting up there with a plastic pouch and a hungry cat. Foster, Alex thought, was being a little reckless with Linda Dumars’s life.
No more scratchy words came out of the box, only a long, loud buzz. Alex pushed the door open. Foster gave him a big shrug. They climbed to the fourth floor. The building had no elevator. Foster knocked.
“It’s unlocked,” somebody called from inside.
As the door opened, Alex heard a sound that was a mix of two sounds: a low, dull roaring and a higher-pitched hiss. He knew that sound, because he used it to bend brake lines and free up tight parts. He pushed in beside Foster, which wasn’t easy, given the man’s bulk. The two of them stood there staring at Gordon Kramer, who sat in a formless stuffed bean-bag chair. In one hand he held a lit propane torch. With the other he lifted a white box— Styrofoam— and turned the sharp cone of blue fire to it.
“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” he said, raising his voice slightly so it would carry over the sound of the torch.
When the blue flame hit the white surface, it bounced back in a circle of bright dancing orange petals. But only for an instant, because then the whole circle melted inward. It left a gaping black hole and a smell like ashes and epoxy in the air. Everything had happened faster than Alex could move.
“Just a demonstration, gentlemen,” Kramer said. He tossed the box toward them, where it fell into two pieces on the floor. “Just packing material. But this isn’t.” He reached behind him to come up with a shiny, fat, silvery thermos. He set down the torch long enough to unscrew the cap. A swirl of genie smoke rose from within. Then he held the torch in one hand and the smoking uncapped bottle in the other.
“Please sit down, over there on the couch,” Kramer said in that same lordly tone. His words conveyed the attitude of pompous villains in old British spy movies, but his voice trembled and his eyes darted up and down. The man was strung tight. If you nicked a high tension wire, it would snap and then whip all over the place.
Foster and Alex both sat down as directed, on the couch about eight feet away from the senior resident, the thermos, and the flame. Kramer placed the cap on top of the bottle but didn’t screw it in. The cloud turned into a wispy plume.
“In the bottle,” Kramer said, “is cryoprese
rved material protected only by liquid nitrogen and a plastic pouch. The torch will boil the N-two, melt the plastic, and thaw the marrow in no time flat. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about. I assume you gentlemen are from the police, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you had some brethren keeping watch outside.”
“No, we’re not,” Alex said. “My name is Alex Glauberman. You and I met on the unit, on Monday. I don’t know whether Jay explained who I am. He hired me to look into a blackmail note, and then into the missing marrow. This is Paul Foster, an old friend of Jay’s.”
“And I’m Donald Duck,” Kramer said. “I remember you from last night. You tried to kick down a wall. You might be what you say, but he’s not. I invented Foster. So don’t try to jerk me around.”
“You invented me?” Foster leaned back and spread his arms over the back of the couch. His right arm lay against Alex’s shoulders. He was trying to sound amused, but Alex could tell how tense his muscles were. Alex felt mesmerized by the steady blue flame of the torch— steady, yet with a flicker along its edges, the flicker that always reminded him of a snake’s tongue. To preserve the specimen, Jay had said, the thawing process had to be done as delicately as the freezing. First the marrow had to sit in the upper part of the tank, in the vapor area, and then it had to be placed, double-bagged, in a controlled-temperature water bath. Alex made himself look Kramer in the face.
A Band-Aid had replaced the previous night’s white bandage above his left eye, but there was a new bandage beneath the eye, a hospital-type dressing of gauze and paper tape. Kramer was pale, with dark straight hair, a square chin, and rather hollow cheeks. He’d look intelligent and sensitive when he wasn’t strung so tight.
Foster said, “Inventing me. I always gave my mama and my papa credit for that.”
“Uh-huh,” Kramer said. “I mean, Foster is somebody Jay knew twenty years ago, whose name I happened to run into, that’s all. If you want to prove that’s who you are, maybe you’d like to toss me some ID.”
“No. No, I wouldn’t like to do that. I don’t carry ID in that name anymore.”
“Well, then, I’ll just have to go on the assumption you’re police.”
“That’s funny,” Foster said. “You don’t know how funny that is.”
“Nothing’s funny. Everything is very serious. I never meant for the patient to be hurt, but some things have gone wrong. Whatever brought you here is one of them. There’s no time to screw around now. All that’s left for me to do is try and run for it, and you are going to have to help. Otherwise, I’ll have to break the bone and suck of the substantific marrow, as a French poet said.”
His chin wobbled and his tongue stumbled over the strange and awkward phrase. He was showing off, but not enjoying it. If they could keep him talking, there might be a slim chance of the propane running out.
“You’re interested in poetry?” Alex said.
“Like Emily Dickinson?” Kramer rested the torch in the crook of his elbow and turned down the flame. The roar and the hiss got quieter. He was careful. The torch itself indicated that. Somewhere along the line he’d guessed he might have to use the marrow as a kind of hostage, so he’d gone out and bought a weapon with which he could threaten it.
“No, not really,” he went on. “I just know how to ask a librarian for help. I had a quote from James Baldwin, too, something about the rope and rape, fear and hatred deep as the marrow. I thought of using it to tie Mr. Foster in tighter, Mr. Foster and Jay.”
Kramer’s eyes flicked over the black man’s, as if testing for a reaction, as if he were worried this might really be Foster though he couldn’t understand how.
“You ever read Baldwin?” Foster asked in an easy, conversational tone.
“No, I just had all these marrow quotes, all dressed up with no place to go. Not for any nefarious purpose, originally. I’d been planning to work some of them into a little talk at a conference I never went to, that’s all.” Kramer flushed and pressed his lips together to keep the words in. Something was bubbling inside him, trying to escape as speech.
“You mean the one in Las Vegas,” Alex said quickly. “The heme-onc?”
“That’s right, yeah. I thought I was in the club. But it’s who you know, not what you know, and all of a sudden Jay Harrison didn’t know me at all. I guess you figured that out, didn’t you? And what else? Did she recognize my voice, was that it? Just like that guy waiting to bank his juices for posterity. You don’t forget the voice that gives you the bad news.”
Kramer jerked his head and shut his lips again, then raised the torch and the bottle. “Believe me when I tell you now to be careful. This one here is the only specimen left. I want you to know I’ve been careful as Hippocrates with the patient’s marrow. This batch never left the hospital, till now. I was going to give it back for payment already received, but now I have to offer a new exchange, my life for the patient’s, in effect.”
“All we want is to get the marrow back safely,” Alex answered him. He didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. Was “she” the bartender, Sandra Stewart? He still didn’t see that connection. He was aware again of the tension in Foster’s arm, and of the fact that Foster, more than Kramer, could be placed in the vicinity of the beach where she’d died. But that didn’t make any sense. And who was the guy waiting to bank his juices, that got the bad news?
“So let’s get down with it,” Foster said. “What’s the proposition? How do we get this thing resolved?”
“The proposition is that one of you will drive me where I want to go. We walk to my car, one of you and me. The one who doesn’t go will have to stay here. I’d take care of him with an injection, except then I’d have to set my hostage down. So I guess we’ll have to tie him up.” Kramer jiggled the torch nervously. He hadn’t had much time to figure this part out, Alex thought. He’d be making it up as he went along.
“In the car, I’ll ride in back with the window open. If anybody follows us, if there are any roadblocks or wrong turns or accidents, the marrow goes crackle-splat all over the road. And you won’t feel the liquid N-2 when it hits you from behind, because you’ll be numb. The effect on your skin will be the same as if I threw acid. We leave within five minutes, or the offer doesn’t stand.”
“Okay,” Alex said. It was better than okay. It meant he didn’t have to let Kramer or the marrow out of his sight. He just hoped Kramer didn’t change his mind. He turned to Foster. “Okay?”
“Okay,” Foster said, “as long as I’m not the one that stays here hogtied. I’m not going to be the sacrificed lamb.”
Alex didn’t like that. That meant Foster had to be the one to handle Kramer— to avoid panicking him but also to decide whether and when to try and jump him if things looked about to go wrong. Alex wanted to be that one. Kramer said, “That’s between the two of you. Make up your minds now.”
“It’s my ass that Feebie has on his brain,” Foster said. “He finds me here, and the stuff gone, you know who he’s going to blame.”
“Okay,” Alex said. What he’d admitted this morning remained true: his tamed malignancy didn’t give him any superpowers. Maybe the best bet was to look for a chance to overpower Kramer now, while it was still two against one.
“Lie down, on your stomach,” Kramer ordered him. “And you, Mr. ‘Foster,’ unplug the phone over there and tie him up with the cord. Glauberman, cross your legs, at the knees. You, tie his ankles and then tie his hands behind his back. Tight. I’ll take your performance here as a test of your good faith.”
Alex lay with his cheek against the dusty living room rug and felt the cord cut into his ankles. He couldn’t see Kramer now. All he could see was the doorway leading into a kitchen, an old-fashioned kitchen with a dirty linoleum floor. The whole apartment had the air of a place where the inhabitant was only camping out. There was a second phone in there, however, sitting on the table. If he could get to it, he could call for help as soon as they left. But not if he was thoroughly tied up.
/> Alex tried pulling his wrists apart against the pressure of the next cord, the handset cord, but Foster wasn’t giving him much slack. Did Foster too want him stuck here, securely, unable to call for reinforcements? Maybe Foster had visions of Kramer’s car running into a fusillade of machine gun fire like Bonnie and Clyde. The marrow might survive that, and the occupants not. “Good,” Kramer said. “Now let’s go.” There was no “gentlemen” anymore, no pretense, nothing but fear and threat. Yet Foster didn’t get up right away.
“Let me roll him over on his back,” Foster said. “Like a turtle. I know you don’t believe me, but I could be in almost as deep shit as you.” When he bent further to roll Alex over, he whispered, “You got to trip him if you get the chance.” Then he stood up and said, “Okay, now what?”
“Go out the door ahead of me. Stay ten feet ahead. When we get downstairs I’ll tell you which way to go.”
On his back, Alex watched Foster walk out the door onto the landing. He craned his neck to watch Kramer turn off the torch and then tighten the silver cap a half turn. The plume of vapor slimmed down into a thread.
“I don’t want to attract attention,” Kramer said, as if his audience would appreciate an explanation. “But it only takes one hand to open it and the other to dump. The plastic will crack when it hits the ground. The marrow will seep out as soon as it starts to thaw. It needs to thaw just right— not that way— or it dies.”
This was the truth, Alex knew, and he thought he should tell Foster not to try anything. But he kept quiet. He couldn’t stand the prospect of lying there like a trussed turkey while the kidnapper strolled away from him with the prize.
When Kramer had almost reached the door, Foster moved. He turned around and charged back into the apartment. Kramer twisted the cap loose and dropped it, but he didn’t dump the contents. As Foster must have hoped, he backed up toward the kitchen to make another stand. Alex went with the program. When Kramer tried to step over his bound feet, he kicked upward. Kramer jumped and tried to regain his balance, the container now clutched in both hands.