Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict

by Thomas T. Thomas

  “No, they just don’t understand you.”

  “Oh, we could be so much trouble together!”

  “In and out of it,” he promised. “Constantly.”

  “Do you really want to make plans about this?”

  “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.”

  “That’s a famous quote, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “That’s experience speaking,” he replied.

  “Then let’s go to your place and test it.”

  * * *

  John Praxis was still only partway conscious when they took him out of recovery and wheeled him off to his hospital room. He recognized his fuddled state and knew it would last for a day or two, maybe a week, maybe longer. The mix of potent anesthetics and analgesics did that to him. As the bed-gurney-trolley thing whisked him feet-first down the corridors, with people obediently scattering out of his way, he recalled saying out loud, somewhat drunkenly, “I feel like pharaoh!”

  Then he must have dozed off again.

  The next thing he knew, he was sitting up in his hospital bed, with the head end angled at forty-five degrees, and it was evening outside the window. He looked around and found his daughter sitting off to one side.

  “How long have you been here?” Praxis asked.

  “Not long. Couple of minutes. How are you feeling?”

  “Hungry—I think.” He looked down toward his feet and saw that the rolling table held a tray with empty plates and a glass, scattered flatware, a crumpled napkin. “Unless I’ve already eaten.”

  “They were there when I came in,” Callie said.

  “Messy of them. Leaving someone else’s dishes.”

  He shifted on the bed, and that’s when the pain first made itself known. His chest ached—not the old ache, the heart thing, but a deep pain going all around his ribs and spine and right down the center of his breastbone. He lifted the front of his hospital gown and saw the familiar red scar crossed with exposed metal staples. Every other kind of surgery they could do these days with needles and tweezers, working through tiny holes in the body—“laparoscopy,” they called it. But taking out an old heart and putting in a new one still required them to crack his chest open and peel back his ribs, like filleting a steamed lobster.

  “Ouch!” was all he could think to say.

  “Do you want a pain pill?” she asked.

  “No, I’m loaded up already. But it’s fun having the little Tagalog-speaking nurse, who only knows five words in English, show me her row of smiley faces with their frowns and tears so I can tell her how much it hurts.”

  “Dad, you’re delirious.”

  “Yeah, I know.” He waited three beats, four, then decided to ask the obvious question. “Antigone couldn’t come?”

  “She had her own procedure yesterday. You remember that? She won’t go out until the bandages come off.”

  “Oh. Yes. Right.” He paused. “But it was a success?”

  “Yes, lovely. We’ll get you one for that double chin.”

  “But not right away. I’m still sore from this heart thing. Thank the lord, I’ll never have to go through this again.”

  “Yes, the doctor says this one’s a keeper.”

  “At least it will see me out the door.”

  “Dad, please don’t talk like that!”

  “It’s nothing but the truth.”

  * * *

  A man could get anything he wanted in Italy with enough money, Brandon Praxis realized. Obtaining official-seeming documents for himself and his brother Paul as a pair of Albanian guest workers had been the easy part.

  Harder was learning enough Italian to get by, although Aunt Callie undertook to coach them while she and Brandon were formulating the rest of their plan. Hardest of all for the two brothers was picking up a repertoire of Albanian phrases, in a suitable dialect with appropriate accent, so they could respond when confronted with any Italian they didn’t know—before, that is, they could awkwardly switch into broken and accented English. Now, the only trick was staying away from any real Albanians who might want to carry on a conversation.

  Knowing how and when to strike was not hard. Callie had intimate knowledge of the family, could sketch the layout of the Villa Nettuno from memory, and knew all the catering firms that supplied her uncle’s lavish parties. Getting the schedule of his upcoming social functions in advance and enlisting two presentable young Albanians as bartender and waiter through a temp agency were, again, merely a matter of money.

  “You sure you can maneuver around a crowded party?” Brandon teased his brother. “That is, without knocking over any of the guests?”

  “I’m a wizard at broken field running,” Paul replied. “The trick will be if the bodyguards strip us naked and ask why a poor boy from the Balkans is sporting a U.S. mil-spec prosthesis.”

  “Then you just kick them in the head and run like hell.”

  Knowing whom to strike was the easiest part of all. Callie opened her scrapbook and showed the brothers dozens of snapshots, formal and informal, in sunlight and in shadow, of both the target and his eldest son.

  Finding the right agent was not that hard, either. They wanted something tasteless, odorless, colorless, and water soluble, with manageable dosing and delayed action that could easily be mistaken for natural causes. The obvious choice was thallium sulfate, a powder they could pick up in any pharmacy or hardware store, because in Europe it was still sold as rat poison. One gram could take down a grown man with a fifty-fifty probability of death, and a single teaspoon contained thirty-three grams of poison. At such high doses, death followed in twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Thallium sulfate was easily countered by administering a chelating agent, ferric ferrocyanide, the inorganic pigment called “Prussian blue,” along with whole blood dialysis. But that would happen only if the doctor suspected poisoning and didn’t mistake the erratic pulse, vomiting, and diarrhea for food poisoning or the burning sensation in feet and fingers for some form of neuralgia.

  The trick would be to administer the necessary dosage to just the two targets without killing off half of Turin’s social elite.

  “I don’t care about them,” Callie protested. “Anyway, three-quarters of ’em are crooks. Meglio morti!”

  “You may not care,” Brandon said. “But we do have consciences.”

  “You see, Aunt Callie,” Paul added, “if you say these are bad guys—followed you to America over a debt, and will kill you to settle it—then we’ll do the necessary. But too much collateral damage is, well …”

  “Unprofessional, is what it is,” Brandon concluded. “Besides, if too many people come down sick, that increases the odds of the medical folk testing for poison and applying the antidote in time. You don’t want that.”

  In the end, they planned to use the power of their positions as snooty Italian waiters to control the poison’s distribution. If the caterer was supplying the wine glasses six to a tray, they would mix all six with lethal doses of thallium sulfate in the pantry. Then all they had to do was get close to the targets and offer them any of two glasses. In case other guests reached for a glass at any time—other than guests standing right beside the targets, of course—the brothers rehearsed the line “No, è tappato! È aspro!” meaning the bottle was corked, the wine was sour, and they were taking it back to the kitchen for disposal. If guests around the targets reached for those glasses … well, those were acceptable casualties.

  At the point of action, however, they didn’t need such subterfuges.

  The event was a gala dinner, held out on the patio overlooking the garden. Matteo di Rienzi and his son Carlo were seated at the head table. Brandon and Paul did not have to circulate among the guests and find ways to avoid poisoning any bystanders. They only had to be quick.

  In the pantry, when he knew no one was looking, Brandon opened a bottle of the evening’s choice, a dry, light Barbera from the Piedmont, and tipped in most of his packet of their special ingredient. “Seven hundred and fifty milliliter
s in a bottle,” he whispered to himself, “that’s about four to six glasses. So two ounces of powder is … nine and a third grams per glass. But those are big glasses out there, so more like fourteen. Close enough!”

  He capped the opening with his thumb, gave the bottle a few shakes to stir the mixture, and whisked away any loose powder with a damp towel. He wiped his thumb carefully and would make sure to wash it thoroughly later, because the poison could also work through the skin. When the waiters came through to serve, he handed the bottle to Paul with a nod, and his brother moved fast—without appearing to hurry—to reach the head table before any of the others.

  The smart thing, the intelligent thing, for Paul to do would have been to pour for Matteo and Carlo then manage to drop the bottle and destroy the evidence. He would certainly have been willing to trade a momentary rebuke for the safety of the other guests.

  In the event, however, Matteo di Rienzi’s old-world hospitality doomed the whole table. From the open doorway, Brandon could see him wave the bottle away from his own glass and gesture for Paul to fill the others first. If either the tables or the glasses had been larger, the hosts might have escaped, because the bottle would empty out before it came back around to them. But six seemed to be the magic number this evening—cozy seating in life as in death. Brandon prayed Paul would skimp a bit with the guests and be generous with the hosts.

  After tipping up the bottle over Matteo’s glass, Paul moved swiftly away. Back at the entrance to the pantry, as he passed Brandon, he nodded and shrugged. “Meglio morti!” he whispered. Better off dead!

  It would have been suspicious if the two Albanians had suddenly disappeared. So Brandon could only hope no one would start vomiting and screaming before the evening ended.

  * * *

  Antigone Wells had waited six days for the bandages to come off. They had not been pleasant days, with her head, face, and neck bound up like a mummy. She had been forced to breathe, slowly and shallowly, through two straws stuck deep in her nostrils beneath the contours of her new nose. She could take in water and a liquid diet through a tube taped between her new lips, and without using her cheeks she could only suck on it by working her tongue and throat together. She was blind and guided herself around her and John’s apartment in a downtown high-rise by following ropes strung from bed to chair to bathroom. Her medical situation was not much different from that of a severe burn victim, except that she had chosen the procedure for herself, and it went much deeper than just the layers of skin.

  On the day of the unveiling, as Dr. Catherine Bellows called it, Wells had asked Callista di Rienzi to accompany her to the doctor’s office but then wait outside. She wanted her first look at the new face, her burst of joy and acceptance, to be a private matter between herself and the doctor. And if she wasn’t entirely happy with the results, Wells wanted that to be private, too.

  “Now I’m going to set you up with a mirror here,” Bellows said. “Right in front of you, about a foot and a half away.”

  Wells touched it for reassurance. “Xhank you, Doctor,” she murmured around the mouth tube.

  As Bellows removed clips, cut through tapes, and unwrapped the bandages, she explained what would happen. “You eyelids will be red and a bit puffy. That’s to be expected, because you haven’t opened them in nearly a week. And your lips will be dry at first, because you haven’t been able to lick them.” The woman continued to cut, unwrap, and peel away the cloth layers.

  During the past week, Wells’s face had felt heavy and numb. She always assumed this was due to a residue of the anesthetic or the weight of her bandages and their pressure against her skin. But as the layers of bandage came off, the feeling did not return.

  “One other thing you’ll notice,” Bellows went on, “is a tiny, almost invisible seam around your face and neck where the implant is attached to the rest of your skin. It will generate a small, keloid-type internal scar. At your age, such scars are largely composed of collagen. They are relatively inflexible and lack any kind of blood circulation. This one will present as a faint white line, hard to see in most lights, but difficult to eradicate surgically.”

  “Xhat doesn’t sound xhery good,” Wells said around the tube.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Bellows said. “It will hide easily with makeup.”

  With a last few snips and turns, the doctor lifted the last bandages away. Her fingers plucked the straws from Wells’s nose and massaged it gently. Her touch felt distant and muted. She unwound the tape around the mouth tube, and Wells felt no pull as the sticky surface peeled away from her skin. Finally the doctor removed the tube and stood back so that Wells could see herself in the mirror.

  The new face was beautiful—the smooth, glowing skin of a twenty-year-old. She turned her head to admire the firm planes of her cheeks, the fine sculpting of her cheekbones, the clean line of her jaw.

  Wells smiled at herself, but the face in the mirror didn’t smile back. The lips retained their vague, upward curve. She tried again, but she could not make those lips move. Her eyes went wide and she blinked—so thank goodness her eyelids still worked. But she could not open her mouth except by working her jaw and pulling it down sharply, and then her lips parted with a dry pop.

  “Xhu-at’s this?” she husked through immobile lips, unable to form the W sound.

  “I—I don’t understand,” Bellows said. She turned Wells in the swivel chair and felt across her face, fingers probing the skin and muscles. “Can you feel that?” the doctor asked.

  Wells could feel only the force pushing against her bones, the deep pressure against her skull. But the doctor’s fingertips, as they touched and brushed the skin under her eyes, might have been manipulating a mannequin. “Unh-uh,” she said. “Like xhy xhace is asleexh.” There went her Ms, Fs and Ps, too. “Xhix this!” she commanded.

  “I’m not sure what went wrong,” Bellows said. “It would appear the nerves did not connect properly during the attachment surgery. I’ve … I’ve never had that happen before.”

  No, not in your vast experience of just three cases, Wells noted silently.

  “We did everything correctly,” the doctor went on. “Perhaps your neurons need time to adjust and learn to pass signals through the ligations in the axons. I expect the nerves will grow in with time. … That sometimes happens.”

  “I can’t lih like this,” Wells husked, having lost her Vs as well.

  The import of what had happened rushed in on her. She would be an invalid. She couldn’t eat in public without embarrassment, because she would have to pry her lips open and seal them closed with her fingers while chewing. She couldn’t drink except by pouring liquid on the back of her tongue. She certainly couldn’t practice law if the jury thought she was trying out an unsuccessful ventriloquist’s act. She couldn’t be a mother if she was unable to sing lullabies to Alexander. She couldn’t be a lover if her kisses with John felt like two strips of cold liver.

  But she certainly had a beautiful, if immobile, face. As she stared into the mirror, the statue of Nefertiti—the frozen image with the vague, half-dreaming smile from the hologram Bellows had taken on her first visit—stared back at her. Yes, she had gotten a younger, smoother face. But oh, at what cost!

  “Shit!” That was the one word she could form without moving her lips.

  * * *

  John Praxis came home from the office a bit early, because he knew it was Antigone’s special day. He was glad and excited for her, almost as eager to see her new face as she was. Not that he had ever thought of Antigone as anything but beautiful. The minor lines and wrinkles she had acquired over the years were part of her life and her character. If it had been up to him, if she had asked him, he would have said the facial implant was totally unnecessary. But she never asked.

  Still, for days she had been cocooned, blind, and threading her way around the apartment like Ariadne tracing a maze. The experience had left them both wanting to get the wrappings off and see what she had bought.


  He opened the door and called out, “Antigone!”

  The place was quiet, drapes drawn, dark.

  He called to her again. “Hey, Tig?”

  “In here, Dad,” his daughter answered from the living room.

  He went in and found her alone. “Where’s Antigone?”

  “Do you want a drink?” Callie asked. “It’s been a long day. Mind if I have one?”

  “No, I don’t want a drink, and yes, suit yourself. Where’s my—” Girlfriend? Lover? Soul mate? In truth, he’d almost said wife. “—Antigone?”

  “She’s not here,” Callie replied, drawing three fingers of scotch in a tumbler from the sideboard. “She’s gone. I don’t think she’s coming back. Not for a while, anyway.”

  “Gone? Why, for heaven’s sake?”

  “Something to do with the implant. She’s beautiful, by the way. Young … radiant. But something went wrong with the nerves. Her face is … like a mask. Lips frozen in a ghastly smile. Cheeks and forehead as smooth and blank as plastic. Only the eyes move. And she speaks with something worse than a lisp. She slurs and dribbles and spits. … It’s terrible, really.”

  “Oh,” was all he could offer, trying to absorb what Callie was saying. “Oh!”

  But, after all, he reasoned, this was a disaster that affected just the body. It was among the things of the flesh. If John Praxis had learned anything over the last couple of years, it was the malleability of all flesh. What had been done in one test tube or bioreactor could easily be corrected and made whole in another. What mattered above any of that was the animating force, the spirit, the person. And Antigone was still alive, still inside the botched flesh—no matter what they had done to her face.

  “I still love her,” he said simply. “The face isn’t important.”

  “I understand, Dad. That’s what you think you feel. But would you have fallen for that woman if she had been ugly—or even plain?”

  “Yes,” he said stoutly. Still, he could see her point. It was Antigone’s face and bearing—her skin as much as her hauteur—that first drew his attention, even though at the time she was trying to take a big chunk out of his company with a lawsuit. But that was before he knew Antigone, the real Antigone, the person inside. And once he knew her, then the physical externals had come to matter less and less.