Pressure Drop

by Peter Abrahams

  Suze nodded.

  “But you’ve only been gone for—” She tried to remember; time had grown disorderly since the kidnapping.

  “I missed my period, Nina. And I’m Old Faithful when it comes to blood flow, you know that.”

  Nina got out of bed and started putting on her clothes as fast as she could.

  “Say something,” Suze said.

  “About what?”

  “About me having a baby.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “I knew this wasn’t a good time.”

  Nina threw on her coat, buttoned it with quick, snapping movements of her fingers. “You said you never ever think about having a baby, not late at night, not when you see one going by in a stroller. Never fucking ever.”

  “So? Who am I betraying?”

  “You’re out of control, Suze.”

  Suze didn’t move, didn’t say another word. Nina crossed the huge room, went out the door and down the four flights to the street. There she stopped to catch her breath. The strength stored in her legs from all those hours on the bike seemed to have disappeared all at once. She was weak, weak from childbirth, weak from the loss of her baby, weak from the Seconal, weak from whatever had been done to bring her back to life. She stood in the doorway, just breathing in the cold air and breathing it out, until a ragged man went by talking to Jesus. Nina stepped out on the slushy sidewalk. She had things to do.

  From a pay phone she called Detective Delgado to tell her about Dr. Crossman. Delgado was in court. Nina started telling someone else the Crossman story. After thirty seconds he said, “This sounds complicated. You better talk to Delgado.”

  “When will she be back?”

  “Hard to say. It’s the Ezekial trial. It might last forever, with the show his lawyers are putting on.”

  Nina hung up. The Human Fertility Institute was gone. Dr. Crossman was gone. That left the lawyer. Mr. Percival. Of Ablewhite, Godfrey, Percival & Glyde. The country squire in the black suit who had witnessed the signing of the papers.

  Now sign here. And here. And here. And here. And once more. Good.

  Half an hour later, Nina was riding an elevator to the top of a midtown steel and glass tower. A man carrying three briefcases whispered to a woman in red suspenders: “Point six, I can’t remember point six.”

  “No escape clause, for Christ’s sake,” the woman hissed as the doors opened at the penultimate floor. “This is the most important meeting of your life, Bart,” she added more loudly as they got off. “If you screw up on me …” The doors closed before she got to the threat clause. Nina went up alone to the top floor.

  Nina stepped out of the elevator and into a quiet reception room furnished with leather couches and chairs and decorated with oil paintings of English rural life that looked old enough to be early imitations of Constable. Except for the small brass plaque on the opposite wall—ABLEWHITE, GODFREY, PERCIVAL & GLYDE—and the woman typing at the desk beneath it, she might have wandered into a men’s club. The woman resembled Alistair Cooke. She spoke like him too. “May I help you?” she said.

  “I’d like to see Mr. Percival.”

  A pair of glasses hung around the woman’s neck. She put them on and peered at Nina. “Have you an appointment?”

  “No,” Nina said. “But I’ve dealt with him in the past and I’m sure he’ll see me. It’s very important.”

  “Your name, please?”

  “Nina Kitchener.”

  The woman pressed a button on her desk. “A Nina Kitchener is here to see Mr. Percival,” she said, and to Nina: “Someone will be out momentarily.” The woman took off her glasses and resumed typing.

  Nina sat in a red leather chair with brass studs on the arms. It was a little less comfortable than the crosstown bus. She leafed through Fortune, Barron’s, Money, Inc. Like pornography, they aroused an appetite, fed it and were interested in one thing and one thing only. Nina’s head began to ache. She closed her eyes. Immediately she saw the face of her baby, clear and vivid. For days his image had been dimming at the center and blurring at the edges. Now his eyes, serious and blue, filled her vision: the eyes of the boy who had tried to show her from the very beginning that he would always hold up his end.

  He didn’t have a name.

  “Ms. Kitchener?”

  Nina opened her eyes. A woman in a gray flannel suit stood before her. “Yes?” Nina said.

  “I’m Mr. Percival’s assistant. Mr. Percival is fully booked today. Perhaps if you’d tell me what this is about I could arrange an appointment at a later date.”

  Nina’s head ached. Her stomach hurt too, and her body was weak. It would have been easy to arrange an appointment at a later date, to go somewhere and curl up. And maybe she would have done that, had it not been for the vision of the baby with the serious blue eyes. Nina didn’t believe in the spirit world, or astral projection, or extrasensory perception, or even sensory perception sometimes, but she felt those eyes on her at that moment. And so, not raising her voice—she was too tired for that—Nina said, “That’s not good enough. I want to see him now.”

  “That,” said the woman, stepping back, “is impossible.”

  Nina didn’t argue. “Tell him it’s about the Human Fertility Institute. And the Cambridge Reproductive Research Center.”

  She felt the woman’s cold stare, but didn’t meet it. She was too tired to raise her voice, too tired to argue, too tired to get into a staring contest. Suddenly she understood the power generated by those silent mothers who had sat in protest for so long in some square in Argentina. She wasn’t too tired to sit. She sat. Mr. Percival’s assistant went away. The sounds of the receptionist’s fingers tapping at her keyboard ceased, but Nina didn’t look up. She reached for the Wall Street Journal and began reading an angry editorial about the money supply. She read it to the end, understanding nothing.

  Mr. Percival’s assistant returned. “Mr. Percival will see you now,” she said in a businesslike tone, as though nothing impolite had ever flared between them. Typing sounds resumed. Nina rose and followed Mr. Percival’s assistant across the reception room and down a thickly carpeted hall to a corner office. She led Nina inside, sat her at a gilded Louis Something chair opposite a gilded Louis Something desk, and left unobtrusively, like a minor courtier.

  Mr. Percival had a fine view of Central Park. He was enjoying it now, swiveled sideways in his chair and talking on the phone, his well-fed profile to Nina. The France of the ancien regime didn’t suit him; he would have been more at home in Fielding’s England. “In the fullness of time,” he was saying in his thick-cream voice, “never means tomorrow, Edgar. I believe you might consider other arrangements.” While Edgar replied, Nina examined the photographs on the wall: Mr. Percival shaking hands with the Governor, both Senators, the President and John Wayne.

  Mr. Percival said goodbye and turned to Nina, folding his plump hands on the desktop. “Now then, Ms.…” he began, glancing down at a memo pad, “… Kitchener, I gather you’re anxious to see me.”

  He didn’t seem to remember her at all. Perhaps it wasn’t surprising—he had seen her for only a few minutes, ten months ago.

  “We’ve met before,” Nina said.

  “Have we?”

  “In February. At the Human Fertility Institute. You had me sign a lot of papers.”

  Mr. Percival didn’t say he recalled the occasion. He didn’t say he didn’t recall it. He said: “And?”

  “And?” And I got pregnant and my baby was stolen and the institute’s gone. This was the hysterical, female answer that might stir the heart of John Wayne and make him hop on his Appaloosa and shoot up bad guys until things were straightened out, but it wasn’t likely to get the same results in Mr. Percival’s office. “And,” Nina said, “I’ve got some questions about the institute.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not empowered to answer them.”

  “I don’t understand. You were empowered to collect my signature.”

  “Your signatu
re?”

  “I told you. You had me sign a lot of papers.”

  “Perhaps,” said Mr. Percival. “But I think any questions might be more properly directed to the institute itself.”

  “Where the hell is it, Mr. Percival? There’s nothing but a bulldozer and a hole in the ground.”

  This outburst didn’t seem to unsettle Mr. Percival. “Are they so far along already?” he said. “I never get out of the office these days.”

  “Then you know about it? What’s going on?”

  Mr. Percival unfolded his hands, rubbed them together, refolded them. “You haven’t explained your interest in the institute, Ms.…” His eyes went to the memo pad.

  “Kitchener,” she said. “Nina Kitchener. And this is my interest—I was impregnated there, my baby was stolen and … and someone tried to kill me and make it look like suicide. And now there’s a hole in the ground and I want to know why.”

  John Wayne remained where he was, up on the wall, but she had touched something in Mr. Percival. His lips moved, but for a moment, he said nothing; and when he did speak, his tone wasn’t quite so creamy. “How … horrible,” he said. “Have the police been informed?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what action are they taking?”

  “They’re investigating.”

  “No one has contacted me,” Mr. Percival said.

  “I haven’t really explained the connection to them.”

  “The connection?”

  “Between the institute and the kidnapping.”

  “What connection would that be?”

  “The father. He’s the only possible connection. I want to find him.”

  “The father?”

  “The donor. If this were a routine custody case, wouldn’t the man be the first one they’d look for?”

  “I don’t practice matrimonial law, Ms. Kitchener,” Mr. Percival said, no longer needing to consult the memo pad for her name. “Without regard to the merits of your idea, I think it’s safe to say that there is no possibility of learning the name of the donor. First, the institute is defunct. It has been sold to Standard Foods.”

  For a moment, Nina felt that her fancy chair had vanished and she was starting to fall. She held on to the gilded arms. “Defunct?”

  “No longer in business. The new owners have discontinued the donor program, which was the sole purpose of the institute.”

  “Then why did they buy it?”

  He smiled. She had forgotten his teeth, yellow as old ivory. “You should be in business, Ms. Kitchener.”

  “I am in business. And I find it strange that the institute has suddenly been liquidated.”

  Mr. Percival stopped smiling. “Are you suggesting that a multibillion-dollar conglomerate like Standard Foods, owned by hundreds of thousands of shareholders, made this deal because of you?” Nina had no answer. “It was basically a real estate transaction, Ms. Kitchener, an exchange of shares for the land. There would be a question in my mind about the very existence of the institute’s records at this point. But even if the records are extant, the name of the donor will not be available to you. You signed the anonymity form—‘The donor shall remain anonymous and neither you nor any resulting issue shall make any attempt to learn the donor’s identity.’”

  “How do you know I signed that if you don’t even remember me?” That brought the yellow smile again. “Everyone signed it. I drew up the form myself. It was central to the whole concept.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because, Ms. Kitchener, what man would donate his sperm if there was a possibility it might lead to aggravation down the road?”

  Nina had no response to that. She was thinking of Dr. Berry: Are we simply manufacturers of sperm and egg, products like any other for trade on the open market? She had bought some sperm, in a small-time way. Indemnified sperm. And Standard Foods had bought the sperm company, in a big-time way. Nina said: “Maybe the anonymity form no longer exists either.”

  Mr. Percival’s voice was creamy again. “All the legal records remain in the care of this office. I think I can put your mind at rest on that issue.” He buzzed for his assistant, scratched something on a memo sheet and handed it to her. The assistant left an expensive scent in the room.

  Mr. Percival rose and went to the window. Slipping his thumbs into the pockets of his vest, he said, “Hypothesize for me, Ms. Kitchener.”

  “About what?”

  “About what happened to you.”

  “I don’t know what happened. That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

  “But you think the donor is involved.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Then why do you want to know his name?”

  Nina didn’t answer.

  Mr. Percival continued: “You think the donor is involved. Is it your contention, then, that the donor somehow learned your identity?”

  Was that her contention? It was sounding thin already; perhaps that’s why she had resisted putting it in a simple sentence. “Yes,” she said. “That’s my contention.”

  “What do the police think of it?”

  “I told you. I haven’t really expressed it to them.”

  “Then how do they explain the disappearance of your child?”

  “They haven’t explained it.”

  “But they must have a working theory. Who is in charge of the case?”

  “A detective named Delgado. Her working theory is that some disturbed woman walked in off the street and just … grabbed him.”

  “But you don’t believe that.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” Mr. Percival asked.

  Why not? There was the volunteer badge. The crushed telephone jack. The attempt on her life, but that itself was in dispute. And there was Laura Bain. “Have you ever heard of the Cambridge Reproductive Research Center?” Nina asked.

  Mr. Percival turned from the window, pursed his full lips. “Not that I recall,” he said.

  “It is—it was—a sperm bank,” Nina said. “Now it seems to be defunct too. A woman named Laura Bain went to it.” Nina told him Laura’s story. He listened silently, his eyes and face expressing nothing. Nina wondered whether he had somehow gained control of his involuntary muscle movements.

  When she finished, he returned to his desk, sat in his chair, folded his hands. “Have you sought professional help, Ms. Kitchener?”

  “Like a private detective?”

  “No.” Mr. Percival sighed. “I meant therapeutic help.”

  Nina banged her fist on the desk before she realized what she was doing. “I’m sick of hearing that.”

  Mr. Percival’s eyes widened. “I didn’t mean to cause offense. Dear, dear, dear. All I’m saying is that perhaps your meeting with this woman was somewhat unfortunate.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “This is a big country, Ms. Kitchener. I don’t know if you appreciate how big. I’m like an air traffic controller. I’m in a position to know. It is teeming. And in any society this swollen, no one’s experience can be unique. There are going to be coincidences. It’s simple mathematics. If there are sperm banks and women who use them and people who kidnap babies, then these three factors are eventually going to appear in the same equation, and more than once. You’ve had the bad luck to stumble on an equation just like yours. It’s a coincidence, Ms. Kitchener, in the basic meaning of the word. When a plane crashes in Chicago and another one crashes in Denver, we don’t say there’s a conspiracy behind it, do we?”

  This was the rational explanation. It matched the experience of the experts, like Detective Delgado, and appealed to something basic in Nina. It would have been easy to nod her head, thank Mr. Percival for his time, and leave. But that wasn’t going to get her baby back. So Nina said: “We do if Dr. Crossman planted bombs on both planes.”

  Mr. Percival’s plump hands tightened their grip on each other. “I’m afraid I lost you,” he said.

  “Dr. Crossman. The director of the Huma
n Fertility Institute. He handled my impregnation procedure. He also did Laura Bain’s, in Cambridge.”

  “The name is new to me,” Mr. Percival said. “I had no dealings with the medical staff.”

  “Are you telling me he wasn’t director of the institute?”

  “I’m telling you I don’t know him,” Mr. Percival said. “I’m not questioning his position.”

  “Good. Because I want you to help me find him.”

  “Is he lost?”

  “I don’t know. He doesn’t have a home phone.”

  “I don’t see how I could be useful, Ms. Kitchener.”

  “You could call the owners of the institute.”

  “The institute had no owners, as such. It operated as a nonprofit foundation.”

  “But someone must have been operating it. Someone must have put up the money. Someone must have hired Dr. Crossman. Some human being who might know how to get hold of him.”

  Mr. Percival rose and went to the window again. The view hadn’t changed, but he didn’t seem to be enjoying it as much. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said.

  “You will?”

  “Give me a few days. Where can I get in touch with you?” Nina gave him the office number. “Is that good all the time?” he asked.

  “Days.”

  “What if I have to reach you at night?”

  “Just leave a message on the office machine. I call in frequently.”

  “Fine,” he said.

  “Does your … helping me mean you’ve changed your mind about revealing the donor’s identity?”

  “It has nothing to do with me, Ms. Kitchener. It’s a legal matter. The anonymity form protects all parties involved—the clients, their issue, the donors, the foundation. And, as I explained, there is no guarantee that the records still exist. But I think we should clear up the matter of Dr. Crossman’s possible involvement with this other fertility clinic.”

  Was it his careful choice of words or his soothing tone that made Nina realize that the matter of Dr. Crossman would be cleared up in some benign way? She could sketch the outline already: Dr. Crossman specialized in artificial insemination. Why shouldn’t he, like any other specialist, move from place to place? Nina sat in the gilded chair, foreseeing another dead end.