by A. C. Fuller
"Like what?"
"It's some kind of Mandarin slang that can mean 'perverted' or 'deranged.'"
"Okay."
"And in Hindi it can be used as the polite way to address a woman, like 'lady' or 'ma'am.' Some people use it as a nice way to address a maid. She confirmed that 'bhoot'—with an H—means 'ghost' and is pronounced a little like 'booth' with an emphasis on the boo."
"'Ghost maid' or 'ghost woman'?"
"Possibly, and in Urdu it can sometimes have the connotation 'prostitute.'"
"What's Urdu?"
"Turns out it's the official language of six Indian states. Also, the national language of Pakistan."
Alex smiled. "Ghost prostitute?"
"Yeah, doesn't really work, does it?"
"There's another option Mara mentioned. He could be saying bhai. B-H-A-I."
"What's that mean?" he asked.
"She said it's a little like 'bro' in English. Indian men will tack it onto a word or a name to make a nickname."
"Ghost bro?"
"Ghost guy or ghost man, maybe?"
"James did say that Innerva was a hacker. Don't they usually come up with cool nicknames for themselves?"
"Yeah, but if she is, we're not going to be able to find out much more about her. So, what do we do next?"
"We need to talk to Betty. But first I've gotta call Greta and Lance."
24
Brookline Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts
Greta gazed out the window of the taxi, thinking of Alex. She'd been trying to teach him to dance and was picturing him the last time she'd taken him to a club, dancing like a caricature of a stiff, uptight white guy. There was something she loved about that.
She and Lance had arrived by bus and immediately hopped into a taxi for Fenway Park, where Greta had a client and Lance had interviews lined up. She heard Lance's deep voice, but it barely broke her reveries.
"We're almost there. Greta. Hey, Greta." He touched her shoulder and she turned, eyes a little glazed over. "Girl, what the heck are you thinking about? We're almost there."
"Alex."
Lance leaned forward to address the driver. "We're going to the media entrance."
"You never told me what you're working on," Greta said.
"Steroids. Remember the whole home-run chase of ninety-nine? Then all the fallout because it turned out everyone was cheating?"
"I don't really follow sports, unless you count dancing to electronic music as a sport."
He smiled sarcastically. "I don't."
"But what story are you writing?"
"I'll be talking to journalists and media brass about why everyone dropped the steroids story after it broke. It's like, they ran the damn stories, then forgot to follow up for two years."
"Why would they do that?"
"It's just business, they're protecting their jobs. But that doesn't mean I'm not gonna rip 'em for it."
"I don't see why it matters. If you could take a pill and get way better at your job, wouldn't you do it?"
"I did. It was what we called cocaine in the eighties. Now, it's called cigars. But this is different."
"How?"
"Statistics were how we all connected to baseball as kids. The game had been the same for a hundred years, and we could compare across eras. Now, all that's ruined. Who you working on tonight?"
"Darryl Cox. A pitcher, or something."
"He's washed up. Only pitched a few innings this series and got rocked. He was one of the best before his body started to go."
"Well, he probably needs me, then."
"I'm afraid there's not much can be done with him. By the way, if you want, I might be able to drum up some business for you with the Red Sox while you're here. I know some guys."
"You want me to work on a Red Sock? When it's almost playoff time?"
"I thought you didn't follow sports."
"I don't, but I have to live in New York City."
"Well—" Lance's phone buzzed in the inside pocket of his jacket. He pulled it out and squinted at the screen. "Hey, it's your man." He stared at the buttons for a few seconds. "Still can't get used to this damn thing."
Greta reached across his lap and pressed "Talk."
Lance pressed the phone to his ear. "How are ya, you handsome bastard? I'm with Greta. Talk fast because we're about to pull into Fenway."
Greta leaned in. "I'm still mad at you about going to the conference, but I have to tell you, talking with Lance about sports is like talking to a man either right before sex or right before he gets dumped, he's—"
"James is gone." Alex was almost shouting through the phone, and Lance let it drop away from his ear.
"What?" Greta reached over and pressed the "Speakerphone" button.
"Disappeared."
Lance said, "What, where?"
"We were in the hotel together last night. This morning, he was gone. Local police are working on it, but I know it was Bice."
Lance put the phone on his thigh and stared at it blankly. "Man, what the hell? Why didn't you tell me right away?"
"Like I said, the police are working on it. There's nothing you can do. I got a call from my source, and Camila and I went across the water to where I grew up."
Greta grabbed the phone from Lance's lap. "That source? Camila?"
"Look, I can't explain everything right now. James is gone and—"
"Alex, get back to New York." Greta leaned into the phone. "I'll leave right now and meet you there."
There was a long silence.
"Alex?"
"I can't. I don't know how or why, but somehow this is all about me."
Greta slumped back and looked out the window at a parking lot filled with construction vehicles and dumpsters. The taxi stopped at a large gate half covered by a white metal sign painted with black lettering. FENWAY PARK: STAFF AND VISITOR ENTRANCE.
"Hold on, Alex. We're here," Lance said, fumbling for his wallet and handing his ID to Greta, who handed it through the window to the security guard.
When they were waved through, Greta grabbed the phone from Lance's knee. "Alex, can you hear me?" she asked firmly.
"Yeah."
"You are coming home."
"I can't."
Greta gave Lance an imploring look as the taxi wound through the parking lot, but he just shrugged.
"Lance agrees," she said. "Just come home."
"I have to go."
"And she's going to help you?"
"To help, just to help. We're trying to find James and…look, she's smart and—"
"I know she's smart, and when we got together, you were still in love with her."
"I'm not anymore."
"You have to do this?"
"I don't see what choice I have. I have no reason to doubt the calls. Someone knows what Bice is up to, and for some reason, wants me to find out."
"Okay," Greta said, but it wasn't okay.
"Greta. Hey, I love you. Say hi to Lance for me and—"
She pressed the red "End" button and handed the phone to Lance as the taxi stopped near the rear entrance.
25
Visitors' Clubhouse, Fenway Park, Boston, Massachusetts
Greta settled onto the stool and closed her eyes. She took a long, slow breath and opened them again. The conversation with Alex was still bothering her, but she needed to let it go. She tried to convince herself that James had met a girl, or gone sightseeing, or . . . She couldn't finish the thought. She had to compartmentalize.
Darryl Cox lay before her, wearing only black sweat shorts stamped with the Yankees logo. She had never worked on him before, so she scanned his body, getting the lay of the land. Long feet. Neat toenails. Tight calves with lean muscles. Giant thighs. She noticed him blinking.
"Close your eyes," she said.
"I know. Just relax, right?"
"Instead of relaxing, just scan your body. Feel where the tension is. But don't try to do anything with it."
They were in a tiny room, formerly a storage close
t, that the team had allowed Greta to transform into a temporary massage studio. She'd taped white sheets to the walls to cover up the cracked and peeling paint. Massage for the players usually happened in a group room, but Greta required silence, and it was the only free space.
She already knew where Cox's tension was. His body reminded her of Alex's—tall, probably six foot two or six foot three, with long, lean muscles. His lower body was relaxed, but a constriction started at his solar plexus and intensified through his chest and up to his throat.
He was nervous, talkative. "You hear they're gonna build a new Yankee stadium?"
"No."
"Years away. I'll be retired by then."
"Hmm," Greta responded.
"Fenway, now that's a cathedral. You been here before?"
"No."
"You know it only cost six-hundred and fifty grand to build?"
"What year?"
"1912. I've gotten cynical about the business side over my twenty years. But, man, I still love to play. I hate the Red Sox, you know, but it's still an honor to play here. Say what you want about the new owners—and I've heard a lot—but at least they're preserving Fenway."
"Can you close your eyes?"
He did, and she scooted the stool forward and toward the center of his body. She extended her legs far under the table, slid her left hand under his neck and her right under his lower back. Next, she cupped the occipital bone at the bottom of his skull with one hand, and the sacrum, just below his lower back, with the other.
"This is weird," he said.
"If you feel uncomfortable, we can stop."
"No, I'm fine. Brian convinced me to try it, so I might as well go with it. Said you helped him get his swing back."
"I just helped him let go of some things that were constraining the rotation of his hips."
Greta expanded her base and settled even deeper into the stool. She could feel the power in his legs from the strength of his cranial pulse as it moved down his spine. But his lower back was tight and got tighter as she sensed upwards. "Your legs are strong," she said.
"Yeah, I still got it down there. I've always been a power pitcher, and power comes from the legs and hips."
He was right, but she was trying to get him to quiet down, so she didn't respond.
"I've lost six miles per hour on my fastball in the last year. Six miles. In a year!" He jerked his chest up a little.
"Lay back," Greta whispered.
He lay back down and she felt him relax into the table. "Yeah, Lance Brickman mentioned you've been having some issues."
"How do you know Lance?"
"He works with my boyfriend."
He was quiet for a minute. "Damn, I was hoping you didn't have one."
There was a brief silence as Greta thought about Alex going against her wishes—tempting Bice, seeing Camila. She wondered whether or not their relationship would last until he made it home.
Darryl said, "Tell me again what you're doing."
"Well, do you believe that every part of the body is connected? That every muscle, every tissue affects everything else?"
"I guess."
"So, instead of isolating the muscles and working on each one separately, I get a sense of what's going on underneath. I can tell how your organs are doing. How your myofascial tissues are doing. It's all connected. Somehow, the power in your legs isn't making it up to your arms anymore."
"And you can tell why?"
She smiled at him, though his eyes were closed. "Maybe, but you need to stop talking."
"Can you just give me a summary?"
Greta sighed. "Have you heard of the inverted pyramid?"
"No."
"I've heard Lance and my boyfriend talk about it. It's a journalism thing about how they put all the important stuff right at the top of an article."
"Right, like 'Darryl Cox blew another save yesterday as the Yankees dropped a crucial game to the Red Sox, five to four, at Fenway Park.' You don't even need to read the rest of the article to find out what happened."
"Exactly. Well, I've been thinking about the body." She slid her hand out from under his sacrum and placed it on his lower belly. "Focus here," she said. "This is where your power should be, where your focus should be. The Hara is what we call it in Japan. Like the base of a pyramid. A pyramid that's not inverted."
She felt his belly give a little, and knew his lower back was relaxing into the table. "Did you feel that?" she asked.
"Yeah." His voice was softer.
Greta continued to speak softly and slowly, with long pauses. "Then, the concentration of energy should get narrower as you move up through the chest, where most of the emotions reside, into the head. We need the head, but it's where we should carry the least amount of energy. For most modern people, this has been flipped, like a pyramid standing on its tip. At the top, we have tons of energy in the form of constant cyclical thinking, then below that, a bunch of out-of-control emotions, finally coming down to a tiny point of constrained energy somewhere around our belly and pelvis."
"Okay, but how does that relate to me losing six miles an hour on my fastball?"
"You've been walking around with all your energy in your head. Nothing here, in your core." She pressed his belly gently into the table and his back relaxed more. "Are you worried about something?"
He didn't say anything, and she knew she had him. His entire lower body was now free of tension. She slowly removed her hands, scooted the stool up about a foot toward his head, and placed her left hand across his sternum, her right hand on his right shoulder.
For the next twenty minutes, he was quiet. She tracked the micro-movements of his sternum, which were like thousands of tiny air bubbles popping. As they popped, the sense of the whole chest area became more unified, until she could feel the energy moving freely into his shoulder and down his arm.
There was a burning in his shoulder, but it seemed like everyday soreness. She held it until the surface level relaxed, but there was nothing she could do about the underlying inflammation. After all, he had pitched two innings the day before. As his shoulder relaxed, he sank more fully into the table.
Suddenly, he said, "You said your man's a journalist?"
She was startled, but managed to quietly reply, "He is."
"You trust him?"
She thought for a moment. "Trust him how?"
"I meant, can I trust him?"
"Anything you tell me is confidential. This is a sacred space. I'd never tell him anything you told me."
"But, what if I know something I want you to tell him?"
"Why would you want to tell anything to a reporter? I thought all you guys did was say the blandest thing possible to stay out of the papers. Lance and Alex made me watch Bull Durham once."
Darryl chuckled. "Yeah, 'And the Good Lord willing, things will work out.' That's what I usually say, but I've got something. Something important. It's what's been bothering me."
Greta could feel his whole body tensing, and she knew the session was over. She didn't think she'd helped him much, as she could tell that his body would quickly recreate much of the tension he'd just released.
She leaned back on the stool.
He sat up quickly and turned toward her, his eyes looking fearful.
"What?" Greta asked. "What is it?"
"How closely you following the election?"
26
Inn on the Sound, Bainbridge Island, Wednesday, September 15, 2004
Alex smelled fog—rich and a little salty—home. He rolled over, grabbed his Blackberry from the nightstand, and checked the time. 8:30 a.m. "Cam, we slept in," he said, swinging his legs off the bed and sitting up. "Camila, wake up."
He hadn't slept well. He'd tried twice to get Betty to speak to him about his parents the day before, but each time she'd either changed the subject or found something that needed to be done for another guest. Finally, she'd agreed to meet him at her bookstore that morning, but her reluctance to talk about his mom and
dad, paired with the source's call, had given him strange, uneasy dreams all night.
He stepped over to Camila's bed. "Time to go meet Betty."
She shifted, rolled over, and pulled the blankets over her head. "Breakfast," she mumbled. "Need breakfast."
He smiled to himself and glanced at his phone, which was buzzing. "Hello?" he said, clicking over to the speakerphone as Camila's head emerged from the blankets.
"Alex, it's Officer Nors."
"Please tell me you found something useful on the security footage."
"I wish I could. But there's not much help there."
"What did you see?"
"Well, your friend went up to Mr. Bice's room, just like we already knew. He stayed for twenty-three minutes, then walked out alone, just as Mr. Bice said."
Alex breathed a deep sigh of relief. At least he'd left the room alive.
"When he left," Nors continued, "he took the elevator down to the ground floor, then exited through the main entrance off the lobby. The hotel doesn't have external cameras, so there is no trace of him after that. And, as we also knew, he didn't go back to his room before leaving."
"Somehow, they must have convinced him to leave, or to go somewhere. Or something like that."
"Maybe, but we just don't have any evidence to indicate that."
"Did anyone else leave Bice's room before or after him?"
"I can't tell you any more."
"Look, Officer Nors, I'm not going to print anything about this. I just want to find my friend. And to help, if I can."
"Did Mr. Stacy know anyone else at the conference?"
"Well, he was supposed to meet a source, someone who claimed to be named Innerva Shah, but I don't think he did. Why?"
"Well, you said he left the bar, where he was with you and Ms. Gray, at around nine p.m., so we looked through all the footage after that. He didn't go straight to Mr. Bice's room."
"Where'd he go?" Alex asked, as Camila emerged from her blankets to sit next to him on the bed.
"We're not sure. The footage shows him walking from the restaurant into a hallway on the first floor. The hallway leads to a block of guest rooms—rooms 101 to 132—then to the lobby. But he doesn't emerge from the hallway until almost an hour later. And that's when he goes to the lobby and calls Mr. Bice from the front desk."