The Genesis Code

by John Case

  ‘Mostly because it was such bloody hard work.’ Hugh screwed up his face and looked at his companion. ‘We’re not hard workers, are we, Nige? I mean, not really.’

  The conversation went on like this, with Hugh clearing the plates from time to time and Nigel serving. The gnocchi were succeeded by grilled lamb chops, and they, in turn, gave way, first to green salad, then to a bowl of fruit, and finally to a digestivo.

  Throughout, Lassiter was content to listen. He didn’t want to ruin the spirit of the meal with his own sad story, but in the end he found Nigel and Hugh looking at him expectantly.

  ‘And now you’re wondering what I’m doing here.’

  Nigel threw a glance at Hugh. ‘Well, of course – we’re professionally incurious – but . . . yes. We did wonder.’

  ‘Just a bit,’ Hugh said with a smile.

  Lassiter sipped a small glass of Fernet Branca.

  ‘If it’s property you’re after,’ Nigel said, ‘I’d say you won’t lose money.’

  Lassiter shook his head. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I was hoping to visit the Clinica Baresi.’

  Nigel winced. ‘Bad luck, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I know,’ Lassiter said. ‘I saw it this afternoon.’ He paused for a moment, and asked, ‘When did it happen?’

  ‘It was – what, Hugh? – August? Late July? Tourist season, anyway.’

  ‘How did it happen?’ Lassiter asked, though he already knew the answer.

  ‘Well, it was arson, wasn’t it, Hugh?’

  ‘It wasn’t just mischief,’ Hugh said. ‘Not kids with candles or firecrackers or any of that. This was a sixteenth-century building – the old part of it, at any rate. Converted monastery.’

  ‘Survived everything the centuries could throw its way, and then –’ Nigel snapped his fingers. ‘– it burned straight to the ground.’

  ‘Professional job,’ Hugh said. ‘Nothing left but the stones! Well, you saw it. Vaporized the mortar. The fire was so hot, some of the stone actually cracked. The firefighters couldn’t get close.’

  ‘Was anyone inside?’

  ‘No. That’s the lucky part, if you can call it luck. The clinic was already closed,’ Hugh said, lighting a cigarette from the candle flame.

  ‘Why was that?’

  ‘Baresi, the doctor who ran the place, was quite ill. And, when he couldn’t carry on any longer, they just packed it in. It was closed for months before it burned.’

  ‘Do you think I could meet him – this Dr. Baresi?’ Lassiter asked.

  Nigel and Hugh shook their heads in unison. ‘Bit late,’ Nigel said.

  ‘He passed away a few months ago,’ Hugh explained.

  ‘Lung cancer,’ Nigel said pointedly, and with a well-manicured hand, swept away the smoke from Hugh’s cigarette. ‘We do miss the clinic, although with Todi becoming so trendy, I expect we’ll replace the business . . . eventually.’

  Lassiter frowned. ‘What “business” is that?’

  ‘Well, the clinic didn’t have residential facilities,’ Nigel explained. ‘So the women who went there – stayed here.’

  Lassiter’s surprise was obvious.

  ‘It wasn’t exactly a coincidence,’ Hugh said with a laugh. ‘I mean . . . we are the only show in town.’

  ‘We had an arrangement,’ Nigel said.

  ‘Dr. Baresi’s patients were given a special rate,’ Hugh added, ‘and we looked after them. Had them picked up at the airport, arranged transport – that sort of thing.’

  ‘It wasn’t as if they were ill,’ Nigel remarked. ‘They didn’t need hospital care. I mean: they were healthy women.’

  ‘So you knew the doctor?’ Lassiter asked.

  Nigel and Hugh looked at each other. Nigel wagged his head. ‘We were acquainted – but I wouldn’t say we were friends. Not by any stretch.’

  Hugh leaned back in his chair. ‘What Nigel means is that the good doctor was a bit of a homophobe.’

  ‘But his patients stayed at your pensione?’

  ‘Well, yes, but then – in Montecastello, we’re it. I suppose he could have put them up in Todi – but, really, we’re more convenient. As for Baresi himself, we rarely saw him.’

  Hugh began to put the dishes on a tray, balancing it on one hand and swooping around the table, snatching up each plate and spoon with an exaggerated balletic motion. He paused, tray uplifted. ‘Actually, I think the famous dottore may have been one of us,’ he said with a knowing grin. He emphasized his points by dipping his chin rapidly, first to one side, then the other. ‘Never married. No women in his life. Dressed like a dream. Quite a taste for antiques. Tiny dog. And – he carefully stayed away from us. It all added up. And that kind is always the most rabidly homophobic.’

  ‘What? What kind?’

  ‘The closet kind,’ Hugh said. He spun on his heel and headed for the kitchen.

  Nigel watched him go and then turned his head to Lassiter. ‘I’m sorry you came for the clinic,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘You must be disappointed. Was it –’ He hesitated and then changed his mind, shook his head. ‘I guess I shouldn’t really ask.’

  ‘Ask what?’

  ‘Well, I mean, was it – your wife? The reason you were coming to the clinic, to check it out first. I mean – were you trying to . . . conceive a child?’ He put his hand over his eyes. ‘Forgive me – appallingly bad manners, I know. Mum and Dad are rotating.’

  ‘No,’ Lassiter said. ‘No, that wasn’t it. I don’t have a wife.’

  Nigel heaved a sigh of relief. ‘I’m glad. I mean – at least you didn’t have your hopes up.’

  Lassiter was curious. ‘Was Baresi’s clinic . . . I don’t know, a sort of last chance? I mean: for most people.’

  Nigel leaned back in his chair, teetering. ‘Well, my whole understanding of the mysteries of reproduction is somewhat limited by the lack of relevance, I suppose. But no, I wouldn’t say the clinic was a place of last resort. It wasn’t like Tijuana or anything. On the contrary, they say the old boy was really quite brilliant. League of his own, so to speak. Patients from everywhere: Japan, South America . . . the four corners. And – most of them left happy.’

  ‘Really. What – What was the doctor’s . . . special expertise?’

  Nigel frowned. ‘Oh, I don’t know. As I said, I didn’t have much native interest. But the women talked about it all the time, and apparently Baresi was really quite successful. Some sort of technical breakthrough. With eggs.’ Nigel frowned. ‘But there you are: I’m hopeless.’

  ‘I hate the word “eggs,”’ Hugh said, coming in from the kitchen. ‘To think of oneself as once an egg!’ His face contorted. ‘Like a bloody chicken. A pea-brained, battery-raised, pecking-order-driven chicken.’ He paused. He grimaced. ‘Anyway, Nige, they don’t call it “an egg.” It’s an oocyte.’

  ‘Really?’ Nigel looked surprised.

  ‘Among other things, il dottore pioneered a method of enabling the oocyte to produce this kind of . . . armor . . . which, ordinarily, it only gets once a sperm has penetrated the wall. It’s an iron maiden, of sorts, in that it keeps the other sperm out. Because –’ Hugh held his hands aloft like a prizefighter. ‘– the winner has already been chosen!’

  Nigel looked appalled.

  ‘Anyway,’ Hugh went on, ‘that armor stuff doesn’t just keep sperm out, it also revs up the whole deal into some kind of superfertile state. It’s ready, you know, to rock and roll.’

  ‘Hadn’t realized you were so well informed about all this,’ Nigel said. He turned to Lassiter. ‘Although his sympathy and handholding qualities were occasionally in great demand from some of the women, poor things.’

  Hugh nodded, and lighted a cigarette. ‘Mostly Hannah.’

  ‘One of our Czechs,’ Nigel explained.

  ‘She was so scared, and so cute. She told me everything, absolutely everything.’

  ‘Hannah Reiner,’ Lassiter said flatly. ‘From Prague.’

  ‘You know her?’

  ‘No,’ Lassiter sa
id. ‘I never met her. She died.’

  26

  ‘I CAN’T BELIEVE it,’ Hugh said when Lassiter finished explaining why he’d come to their pensione. The Englishman sucked hard on a Rothmans Silk Cut and shook his head. Slowly.

  Nigel, dumbfounded, looked from one to the other, then rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. ‘What on earth?’

  ‘I was hoping there might be something at the clinic that . . . I don’t know – would somehow make sense of things,’ Lassiter said. ‘But what about Baresi’s house? Maybe he had an office there. . . .’

  Hugh shook his head, and explained that Baresi’s living quarters had been in an annex of the clinic. And when the clinic went up in smoke, so did his rooms and everything in them. ‘Nothing left, I’m afraid. Absolutely nothing.’

  ‘Pas des cartes, pas des photos, et pas des souvenirs,’ Nigel added.

  ‘What about the nurses?’ Lassiter asked. ‘They must know –’

  ‘No nurses.’ Hugh shook his head, and stabbed out his cigarette. ‘Couple of lab assistants – but I don’t think they’d be of much help, really.’

  ‘“Lab assistants”? You’re telling me this guy ran a clinic – and he didn’t have a nurse working for him?’

  ‘He was a very secretive man. And it wasn’t that sort of clinic, anyway. It wasn’t a doc-in-the-box, or one of those places with hordes of patients. It wasn’t a hospital. It was . . . more of a research facility, wouldn’t you say, Nigel?’

  ‘Mmmm.’

  ‘I don’t think the old boy took more than fifty or sixty patients a year – though from what I’m told, he could have had five times that number if he’d wanted.’

  ‘What about the lab assistants, then?’ Lassiter asked.

  ‘Well, one was more of a char, really; cleaned up – that sort of thing. The other was a bit more compos mentis – but I don’t think we’ve seen her since the fire, have we, Nigel?’

  ‘No. I think the fire spooked her. Someone said she’d gone to Milan.’

  Lassiter frowned, and thought for a moment. ‘Was there anyone else? Friends? Relatives? Anyone like that?’

  Hugh looked at Nigel. ‘Don’t think so. Not really. Although . . . you might talk to the priest.’

  ‘Of course!’ Nigel exclaimed, ‘the padre.’

  ‘I don’t think they were friends, exactly –’

  ‘But they played chess, didn’t they? In the square!’ Nigel said. ‘Shared a glass – that sort of thing.’

  Hugh nodded. ‘Offhand, I’d say Azetti’s just the man.’

  ‘What’s he like?’ Lassiter asked.

  Hugh shrugged. ‘Outsider. Suspect. Not much liked by the locals.’

  ‘They say he’s a bit of a Bolshevik,’ Nigel added, stifling a yawn. ‘Which, I suppose, is why he’s here.’

  ‘Still,’ Hugh said, ‘talking to the padre is definitely worth a try. And: he speaks English. Rather well, actually.’

  ‘I’ll look him up in the morning,’ Lassiter said. ‘Where can I find him?’

  ‘In the church. In the square. I can give you directions,’ Nigel said, ‘or you might just wander around and get lost. Eventually, you’ll end up in the square. It’s unavoidable, really.’

  The three of them got to their feet in unison, and Hugh said he’d finish clearing up. Beckoning for Lassiter to follow, Nigel led the way down the hall, snuffing candles as he went. When they entered the lobby, the Englishman went to the front desk and asked if Lassiter wanted a call in the morning.

  ‘I have a clock, thanks.’

  ‘Hold on,’ Nigel said, ‘there’s something I want to show you.’ Opening a leather-bound book that lay on the desk, he turned through a number of pages, stopped and looked up. ‘This is our guest ledger. Goes all the way back to when we opened the place – we only had three guest rooms renovated at the time. Hughie had the book specially made in Gubbio.’ He closed it so Lassiter could see the fine leather work, the spine with its handworked raised ridges, green and gold, and the cover, with its magnificently worked eagle holding in its talons a signboard: L’AQUILA. Nigel ran his fingers over the surface, then opened it to the first page. ‘June twenty-ninth,’ he read, ‘1987. Our first guest. Mr. Vassari. He stayed two days.’

  ‘It’s a beautiful book,’ Lassiter said.

  ‘It is, isn’t it? But the reason I wanted to show it to you: all of our guests are in here. Name and address, telephone number . . . dates of the visit. I looked for your sister a little while ago, and when I found the entry, I remembered her. She was quiet. Read a lot. And she asked me for my scone recipe.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘Here,’ he said, turning to a page in the first half of the book. ‘Have a look.’

  Lassiter did, and there, in a beautiful hand, was the entry for Kathleen Lassiter.

  Kathleen Lassiter – C.B.

  207 Keswick Lane

  Burke, VA – USA

  703–347–2122

  Arr: 21–4–91

  Dep: 23–5–91

  She’d stayed thirty-two days. He hadn’t remembered it being so long. But then, of course, he’d been busy; he was always so fucking busy. ‘What’s that?’ he asked, pointing to the notation, C.B.

  ‘Clinica Baresi. To keep track of the discount. We have other little notations. O.T. – for the tourist office in Todi. AVM is the Agencia Viagge Mundial – a travel agency. Like that.’

  Lassiter nodded, without much interest.

  An elegant shrug. ‘All of our guests from the clinic are in there. You’re welcome to look.’

  Suddenly, Lassiter understood. ‘So, Hannah Reiner . . .’

  ‘Hannah, your sister – all of them.’

  Lassiter was thinking that he might be able to identify something that would link his sister and the other victims. Maybe their visits overlapped. . . .

  ‘It’s real scut work,’ Nigel said, ‘but you could work up a list of the clinic’s patients – I mean . . .’ He shrugged.

  Lassiter was thinking how tedious it would be to go through all the names in the book, looking for the C.B. notations – making a list as he went. Just the thought of it exhausted him. But he hadn’t any choice.

  ‘Well,’ Nigel said, turning away and submitting to a deep, shuddering yawn that reflected Lassiter’s own level of fatigue.

  ‘One other thing,’ Lassiter said. ‘Can you tell me when the clinic opened?’

  Nigel frowned. ‘Oh, I don’t know: ’ninety, I should think – or ’ninety-one. Something like that.’ And with that, Nigel wiggled his fingers in the air, turned and walked off down the hall.

  Beginning with the January 1990 entries, Lassiter paged through the register until he found the first of the clinic’s guests. This was Anna Vaccaro, a woman from Verona, who’d checked in on May third. She’d stayed at the Aquila for seven days.

  A few minutes after he began, Lassiter went to his room, retrieved his laptop, and returned to the lobby. With the register beside him, he created a file called cbguest.1st, and started logging in the names, addresses, and dates. Before long he found not one, but several patterns. Almost all of the women stayed five days or a week. But a few, such as his sister, remained at the Aquila for much longer, thirty days or more.

  The first of these was Lanielle Gilot, of Antwerp, who’d come to the hotel near the end of September 1990, and left a month later. Lassiter’s sister had done the same, and there were probably others in the book as well.

  Lassiter was typing Gilot’s name into the laptop when Hugh arrived in the lobby, brandy snifter in hand. He looked surprised until Lassiter explained what he was doing and asked why some patients at the clinic stayed less than a week, and others more than a month.

  ‘Different procedures,’ Hugh said, leaning against a column. He was slightly drunk.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Hugh frowned and looked up at the ceiling, as if he might find the answers there, then down at Lassiter. His focus was a little hazy. His face had the look of sweet concentration of a child thinking hard.<
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  ‘Different procedures,’ he repeated. ‘“In vitro fertilization” was the quickest. Very efficient. They take one of the woman’s eggs and . . . how much do you really want to know? I mean, the ladies did tend to go on about it.’

  Lassiter shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, as I said: in vitro fertilization was a short stay. The ladies were in and out in a few days.’ He closed his eyes, screwed up his face, and thought some more. ‘And then there were the various . . . transfers. Gamete transfers. Zygote transfers.’ He looked amused. ‘Strange lexicon for baby-making, don’t you think? I mean, really!’ He paused, then spit the words out: ‘“Gamete intrafallopian transfer.” Try to say that when you’ve had a snootful.’ He looked at Lassiter with a lopsided grin. ‘What is a bloody gamete anyway? One feels one ought to know. . . .’ He swirled the brandy in his glass.

  ‘What about Hannah Reiner?’ Lassiter asked, tapping the page he’d been working on. ‘I haven’t gotten to her yet. Which was she?’

  Hugh rubbed his eyes. ‘That’s another one,’ he said. ‘Oocyte donation. Took a month. Your sister was one of those, wasn’t she?’

  ‘I think so. I mean, yeah: she stayed for quite a while.’ He paused. ‘Do you know why it took so long?’

  Hugh started to shrug. ‘Actually,’ he said, as if he surprised himself, ‘I do know. Hannah explained it to me. First of all, old Baresi required this very long stay. Another clinic Hannah had been to, you just went in for an intake visit and they gave you shots and pills to give yourself.’

  ‘Shots and pills?’

  ‘It had to do with getting her body synchronized with the donor’s body.’

  ‘What donor?’

  ‘The egg donor. That’s what “oocyte donation” is.’

  Lassiter looked completely baffled.

  Hugh sighed. ‘Sometimes . . . a woman like Hannah . . . just cannot get pregnant. Because her eggs . . . are too old.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Wellll . . . they’ve got them all – I mean, women do – when they’re born. You knew that, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ Lassiter lied.