“I will do my best to satisfy your wishes,” the gentleman told her.
He held out the cash to return to her. “There will be no charge for the four mice, should I be able to find what you are looking for.”
Bonnie hid her hands in her pockets. She had learned that service proceeded more smoothly when money changed hands.
“A week from today,” she said and left the shop.
When she returned a week later, the shop owner smiled and said, “I have what you asked for. Four white mice. Two of them are only three months old, and the other two are approximately three years of age. As you know, mice more than three years old are uncommon.”
“That will do,” Bonnie said. “You will say nothing of this transaction to my father or anyone else. Is that understood?”
“If that is what you wish, most certainly, this shall remain our secret.” Again, the unreadable smile.
At home, Bonnie kept the two old mice separate from the two young ones for the next week. She fed them and observed them. She studied online videos and read medical descriptions of the procedure until she felt certain she was competent to go forward.
From an online medical-supply warehouse, she secured a twenty-five-gauge needle to fit on a syringe as well as a plastic restraining tube, each of which she’d procured from a different medical-supply operation. On the day she determined she was ready, she tucked one of the young mice into the restraining tube so that its head and most of its body were inside the tube, but its rear legs protruded.
By holding the mouse close to a table lamp for five minutes, Bonnie warmed the creature, which was the proper technique for increasing the blood flow. From the far corner of the room, Miriam, her Siamese, was observing her work attentively.
When the five minutes were up, Bonnie tugged the left leg straight and clipped away the fur from its thigh. She dabbed the bare skin with petroleum jelly to prevent blood from running. She tightened a length of twine around the mouse’s left leg just above the knee. A tourniquet. She located the saphenous vein and punctured it with the tip of the needle. She left the needle in place for fifteen minutes. The mouse quivered in protest, and squeaked three times, but otherwise was docile.
When the fifteen minutes had elapsed, she withdrew the needle, tugged the mouse out of the restraining tube, and let it loose on the bedroom floor. It had served its purpose. Miriam required only a few seconds to trap the mouse under Bonnie’s bed. She played with the creature for half an hour before losing interest in its lifeless form.
Bonnie repeated the exercise on the old mouse. It protested less, squirmed less, but otherwise acted similarly. When the tests were complete, she deemed the results satisfactory. Bonnie had only to wait till the following Tuesday to perform the experiment for real.
On that Tuesday, Bonnie concealed the old mouse in the right zippered pocket of her jacket and the young mouse in the left pocket. She drove with her father to Albion International’s offices as usual, where her father let her out in the parking garage and told her he’d meet her in half an hour in the infirmary.
Her father always made Bonnie wait that long while he made phone calls or went over his daily schedule in his office. His thoughtlessness in this regard annoyed her, this habit of making her wait for the transfusion of the plasma from her father’s blood. Today, however, that half hour of freedom was crucial to her plan.
She went directly to the infirmary. Let herself into the procedure room, where the two lounge chairs sat on either side of the centrifuge that would separate the red cells from the plasma and platelets, and pump the depleted blood into her father while Bonnie received the plasma-dense blood from a second plastic tube attached to the blood separator.
Bonnie put the old mouse and the young mouse in their plastic tubes, rear legs exposed. She set the old mouse in her father’s recliner and inserted the needle into its saphenous vein. Then she repeated the process with the young mouse and laid it in her own chair.
She recalibrated the device for the reduced size of the subjects, then switched on the machine and let it run for fifteen minutes, pumping enriched blood from the old mouse into the young mouse. At the end of that time, she withdrew the needles, extracted the mice from the restraining tubes, and put them in the pockets of her jacket, zipped shut.
The company’s nurse, Jackie Neiderhoff, entered the infirmary as Bonnie was hanging her coat on the wall hook. Her father and Ms. Bixel entered a minute later. Bonnie lay on the recliner and endured the procedure for the next half hour. When it was done, she claimed to be feeling weak and dizzy and kept complaining about her condition until her father relented and ordered one of the corporate limos to take her back home.
In her bedroom Bonnie returned the mice to their separate cages, which she had hidden in her underwear drawer. Both seemed weary and listless. She watched them for a while until both fell asleep, then she curled up on her bed with her laptop and continued her research.
For two weeks, Bonnie repeated the process, subjecting the mice to the same twice-weekly blood enrichment procedures she was receiving. After that period, the results were abundantly clear. To substantiate her case, she had taken photographs with her phone and had recorded careful observational notes, which she kept in a loose-leaf binder. This was the evidence she would present when the time came.
The young mouse had lost its appetite and had become lethargic. His fur had grown dull and patches were falling out. His gums were bleeding. The old mouse grew larger and stronger and more active. His coat was shinier, and he ran in circles for hours at a time in his straw-covered cage. The old mouse was becoming young and the young mouse was becoming old.
Precisely as she’d suspected, her father had lied. The nurse had lied. It was likely Ms. Bixel was aware of the scheme too. Of course, if confronted by Bonnie’s evidence, all would deny that the centrifuge was meant to do exactly the opposite of what they claimed.
Bonnie was being subjected to a reverse case of parabiotic rejuvenation. The regular plasma transfers from Bonnie’s body to her father’s enriched Lester Albion’s blood chemistry. His old kidneys and liver were benefiting from having his blood scrubbed by Bonnie’s kidneys and liver—a benefit far greater than a simple blood transfusion could provide.
Her father was feasting on Bonnie’s youth. Growing strong, enhancing his muscles and his skin and his internal organs while Bonnie was receiving regular dosages of her father’s geriatric blood—which explained her recent lassitude and lack of focus.
She had documented the evidence. Now she needed to decide whom to present it to. She was all but certain the police would not take her seriously. They had failed to prosecute her father for murders he’d clearly committed. Her father wielded such power over the nation’s justice system, and his influence was so widespread and so profound, that she doubted anyone in Zurich or possibly in all of Switzerland would be immune to his authority.
It was even possible there had been no crime committed. It might be perfectly legal for a father to use his daughter’s blood to boost his own system. Perhaps other fathers and mothers were using their children in the same fashion. She didn’t know for sure. Though she doubted it.
The only man in the world she knew and trusted fully was Adrian Naff. Bonnie had witnessed Mr. Naff standing up to her father when no one else would. She believed Naff was independent and honest. But she had to find a time and place to lay out the evidence before him. And it had to be soon. She was afraid the day was fast approaching when she would lie down on her sheets, like the young mouse in his bed of straw, and never rise again.
TWENTY-TWO
Bari Milling Works, Bari, Italy
For many years, Gerda had believed herself incapable of orgasms.
She believed she would have to be satisfied instead with nonsexual versions of bliss: the exalted rush of athletic triumph, the delirium of endorphins, or the intense rush of homicide.
In her bed alone, she tried everything to achieve sexual release. Phallic toys, vibr
ating wands, lubricants. In those solitary attempts, she sometimes came close, rolling the rock of self-gratification up the steep hill of self-consciousness. But her mind inevitably interfered. She could not find the fantasy that persisted to the end.
She imagined different men, black and white, sinewy or soft. She created perfect lovers, one more powerful than she, another exquisitely tender and willing to go to any lengths to please. She pictured them in exact detail. She gave them seductive words, she let them disrobe her stitch by stitch, peeling away her layers, touching her flesh lightly with their fingertips, or treating her roughly, overpowering her. It did not work. None of it.
Once, she had filled her room with scented candles. In the dark, she lay back on silk sheets amid the fluttering light, then rolled the rock inch by inch up the mountainside, her fingers doing quick, slippery duty.
That night she could feel it coming. She braced herself, she raised her hips to her hand, probed her muscular depths, and she could feel the clench, the explosion so close. Then, as always, the self-hypnosis failed. She woke from her dream. She was simply a pathetic girl on the sheets of a lonely bed, surrounded by melting wax that stank of vanilla. The rock slid from her hands and rolled back down the mountainside. She believed herself defective.
Four men had lain between her thighs. Five, if she counted Max Bixel, her father. Which she did not.
“Wir tun, was für die Familie nötig ist,” her mother would repeat. We do what we must for our family’s sake.
Max Bixel had been an Olympian—one of the greatest weightlifters of his generation. Six feet tall and more than three hundred pounds. His combined total in the snatch together with the clean and jerk was 1,043 pounds. A record that lasted well beyond his death.
After retiring from sports, he found work on the loading docks in a nearby town, carrying crates of machinery from one truck to another, a menial job that paid poorly but was all the man aspired to.
When Gerda was only five, Max came into her bed. It may have started earlier, although she had no recollection of anything before that age. She remembered that room because her father had affixed glowing stars and moons and meteors to the ceiling in her bedroom in that house in the town of Falkensee, just west of Berlin.
She watched those stars glow as he satisfied his needs and while her mother, Larissa, sat in a chair in the corner of the room, typing on her laptop. Her mother told her that she stayed nearby to be certain no harm came to Gerda. She’d read while Max grunted and heaved and Gerda watched the moon and stars and meteors.
“Heirate keinen armen Mann, denn so verhalten sie sich,” her mother would say. Do not marry a poor man, for this is how they behave.
Three other sexual partners came later, all schoolboys. They fumbled and they finished fast and left her lying with her britches at her ankles and that was that. Nothing to remember, nothing to forget.
Gerda was seventeen when it ended with her father. For years he had been as gentle as a big man could be while committing such an act. But as Gerda matured and her body bulked up from her athletic training, Max became increasingly rough. At the same time, her mother grew ever more focused on her work at Albion International and no longer had time to chaperone the evening events.
The final night with Max began like all the others. He entered her room, shut the door, and pulled the covers back and, without preamble, mounted her. She didn’t struggle, didn’t try to fight him off. She never had. She never complained, never told her mother that these violations should end. She endured them because she saw no remedy. The man’s strength was brutish and overwhelming.
But by that night in Gerda’s seventeenth year, Max had grown old and paunchy, his muscles slack, and no longer fearsome in his strength. And her mother’s job at Albion was sufficient to take care of their needs without Max’s paltry income. Her mother had made sure Gerda knew every detail of the family finances because, as she liked to say, “How much you have in your wallet is exactly how free you are.”
When Max finished that night and rolled from her body, buried his face in the pillow, and began to snore beside her, Gerda slipped from the bed and drew from her dresser the red-and-green Christmas scarf her mother had given her that very year.
Without waking her father, she took one wrap around Max Bixel’s throat and crossed the scarf into an X behind his hairy shoulders, then took tight handholds on the two ends. She climbed aboard Max’s broad back, gripping him with her thighs as one would mount a wild horse in need of breaking.
She cinched the material tight and pulled back with all her strength. Max Bixel woke, coughing, gasping, and tried to buck her off, tried to roll away, tried to swing his beefy arms behind him to strike her. But she dodged his frantic blows and rode him without mercy, tightening the material, tightening it against that thick, soft neck, and as he reared and twisted and struggled up to his hands and knees, she held firm with her thighs and tipped her head back to see the glowing moon and stars and meteors above, and she choked him till he collapsed flat on the bed and heaved his last heave.
“Good for you,” her mother said. “It is finished now.”
She stood in the doorway while Gerda continued to tighten the silk.
“We will have to find a place to bury him. It will not be easy with all that bulk. He let himself get fat, didn’t he? Ein echter Slob. This will be our secret and will bind us even closer, you and me . . . bind us forever.”
“Where are you, Gerda?”
“I’m here, of course. Right beside you, exactly where I belong.”
Manfred Knobel rolled up on his side and reached out, and with a slender finger he traced the fine golden hair that rimmed her navel, a tickling touch. His bedroom was sunny and smelled of lavender and fresh linen and the astringent chemicals wafting up from the olive mill on the floor below.
She heard the workmen down there dumping crates of olives into the stainless steel tubs. She heard their voices, felt the rumble of the machinery, the olives jostling through the stages that Manfred had shown her, so proud of his shiny machines that removed the stems and leaves, washed the fruit before it rolled down chutes into the mill itself, where giant grindstones big as the wheels of bulldozers crushed the olives into a paste, then pumped that paste through another machine, a trough with mixing blades, and on and on. Such a complicated process. Such enormous, noisy hardware to extract those droplets of golden oil.
Manfred wanted Gerda to share his love of the mill, to partake in his fascination for olive oil itself, and she had tried to do so, tried to learn the vocabulary of his business to become his faithful partner.
Manfred was caressing the ripples of Gerda’s abdomen, the ridges and contours of muscles she worked so hard to maintain. His gentle hand stroked back and forth across her flesh between her breasts and the brim of her pubic hair as if slathering her belly with oil.
His attention to her body was worshipful, much as hers was for his. Who else but Manfred appreciated the excruciating labors she had endured and fully understood the triumphs her body had accomplished? And who but Gerda fully understood the ordeals Manfred had suffered on his way to his countless victories?
“Are you ready again?” she asked. “So soon?”
“You want to climax? You haven’t, have you?”
“No, I haven’t yet,” she said. “So yes, I do.”
Penetration did not work for Gerda, which no doubt was her father’s fault. With Manfred, insertion was pleasant enough, for his equipment seemed a perfect fit, filling her to what felt like the exact depth and fullness she desired. Together they would find a rhythm in harmony with their mutual needs. But no matter how pleasurable it was, it did not bring her to completion.
However, in the early weeks of their courtship they had discovered a way to achieve her satisfaction. She could not reconstruct exactly how they stumbled upon the arrangement, but like dark magic, it seemed to come from nowhere, and it worked.
Manfred lay flat on his back, one leg stretched out on the matt
ress, the other cocked up with that foot flat on the bed. Gerda, facing away from her lover, mounted his raised thigh and poised herself against that beautifully sculpted muscle, sliding and grinding for minutes, her breath becoming fast, her heart rising to tumult, until the instant of release she’d never known before.
The first time, for several minutes afterward, she’d sobbed in ecstatic relief, and on every subsequent occasion she wept again.
Today when their lovemaking was done and they were lying side by side on top of the rumpled sheets, Manfred wiped a tear from her cheek and said, “I can’t believe you’re here. So long apart, no word from you, then you’re in my bed again.”
“I’ve been working.”
“But you can’t tell me what it is you are doing.”
“All right,” she said. “You’ve made me weak. I will confess.”
“So?”
“I’ve been following someone.”
“What?”
“I’ve been shadowing a woman. First in Bilbao, then Madrid, then in the south of Spain. And now I believe she’s somewhere nearby.”
“Near here?”
“I believe she is, yes.”
“Shadowing someone. I don’t understand.”
“My employer believes this woman intends to do harm to him and his business concerns. So I’ve been assigned to follow her and send reports on her actions so he can defend himself against her, if need be.”
Gerda left out the killing part, because Manfred, a strictly moral man, would disapprove.
“Then you’re acting like a spy. A good spy.”
“All right, yes.”
“And this woman is in the vicinity? Here in Bari.”
“I haven’t located her yet. I lost her trail several days ago, but my employer believes this is her ultimate destination.”
“Who is your employer?”
“I cannot say.”
“Well, in any case, this is quite fortunate for me.”
“And for me as well.”
“I wish you could stay with me.”
When You Can't Stop (Harper McDaniel Book 2) Page 16