Pressure Drop

by Peter Abrahams

  “I’ll show you the spot.”

  Moxie laughed, a delighted, open-mouthed laugh that slowly diminished to a giggle, a smile, a straight face. Matthias knew Moxie didn’t consider him a friend, but there was something like friendship in his eyes when he said, “Brock he didn’t go to Florida like he say. The ticket girl in Nassau be telling Casey. He got on the plane to New York.”

  Later that day, Matthias caught the Nassau-New York flight himself. He wore the warmest clothes he owned—corduroy pants, a flannel shirt, a plaid-lined windbreaker—but he wasn’t prepared for winter in New York. He hadn’t been north of Florida in a long time. He felt cold waiting in line for a taxi at Kennedy, cold inside the taxi, where he couldn’t get the driver, separated from him by barriers of language and thick glass, to understand that he wanted the front windows rolled up and the heat turned on, cold as he got out of the cab, crossed Fifth Avenue and entered the Plaza Hotel.

  He had forgotten how some people lived. He had forgotten about furs and diamonds and wrinkle-free faces on old people, and all the other things that had gnawed at Marilyn and eventually driven her away from him to a richer life with Howie Nero. Matthias, in his windbreaker, corduroys and flannel shirt, walked past a woman in a black silk dress who stood on a small dais playing Mozart on a violin, and stopped at the reception desk.

  The clerk, who would not have looked out of place dancing with Katharine Hepburn in a thirties comedy, turned to him and in an accent not unlike Hew’s said: “May I help you, sir?” Polite, professional, impersonal, but something in his eyes made Matthias think of Danny: Mom says you’re a dinosaur.

  “I’m trying to reach one of your guests. His name is Brock McGillivray.”

  “One moment,” said the clerk, tapping at a keyboard. He watched a screen for a few seconds, then said: “We have no guests of that name.”

  “He might have checked out,” Matthias said.

  “Checked out?”

  “Leaving a forwarding address, for instance.”

  He tapped again at the keys, and didn’t seem unhappy to say, “No McGillivrays in the past week, I’m afraid.” Pause. Slight upturn of lips. “Is there anything more I can do for you?”

  “Try under ‘Muller.’”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “B. Muller.”

  The clerk’s lips turned up a little more. He was formulating a response when a phone buzzed. He picked it up and started talking.

  Matthias began to doubt himself. It was hard to picture Brock at the Plaza. He reached into his shirt pocket for the bill he had found caught in Brock’s bedsprings. He turned his head slightly as he did, and so glimpsed an elevator opening on the other side of the lobby, and Brock stepping out.

  Matthias almost didn’t recognize him. His hair was short, his earring gone, the piece of eight which always hung around his neck not in evidence. Brock had a coat over his arm, wore a dark suit, a white shirt, a maroon tie and tortoiseshell glasses. Matthias had never seen him wear glasses. Except for his size, Brock fitted in perfectly at the Plaza. His size attracted one or two discreet looks. Brock didn’t seem aware of them. He put on his coat—a long black coat with a split tail, the kind a gentleman rancher might wear—and walked quickly toward the Fifth Avenue door.

  The dinosaur turned and followed.

  HAPPY

  35

  A big Christmas tree lay across the northbound lanes of the Bruckner Expressway, damming thousands of cars in the Bronx. Nina’s rented compact was one of them. It brought out the holiday spirit in the traffic reporter on her radio. “Never seen anything like it,” he said, making no attempt to hide his glee. In the car next to Nina’s, a red-faced man was shouting into a cellular phone. Nina switched to FM, found a classical station doing a Caruso retrospective. She stayed with it until the first two notes of “Salut Demeure.” Then she turned off the radio.

  Snow began to fall. Nina passed the accident spot. Workers had dragged the Christmas tree to the side of the road. They were cutting it up with chainsaws, as though making an example of it in case any other rebellious conifers were thinking of making a break for it. A policeman blew his whistle at Nina and furiously waved her on.

  Traffic was heavy all the way to Danbury. The snow reduced visibility, closing Nina off from the outside world. There was nothing to do but keep the car at a safe speed, pointed in the right direction. With no distractions, her mind, prodded by “Salut Demeure,” spun like a wheel and stopped at the night of the birth. Her memory had already edited the material. Struck from the record were the waiting, the pain, the nurses, most of Suze; what remained was the end: Dr. Berry’s singing and the baby with the serious blue eyes. A perfect baby, with all the right numbers of fingers and toes.

  I trust you understand the importance of good nutrition and health practices during pregnancy.

  Who had said that? Nina couldn’t remember. Was it important? Turning onto Route 7, she tried to concentrate. But her mind didn’t want to help her. It wanted to draw up a list of boy names and linger over them one by one. The names were already materializing, like photographs in a darkroom bath. Nina forced herself not to see them, to resist the pleasure, normally so domestic and maternal, but in her case irrelevant and masochistic. She would get no pleasure of any kind from what had been done to her. She would never forget, never forgive, never allow herself to heal, never accept. Until someone proved otherwise, her baby was alive and therefore somewhere, and that meant there was no excuse to stop looking for him. That was her job.

  Nina told herself that, and for a few miles felt strong and purposeful. But in the darkroom, boy names kept taking shape. She had to turn the radio on loud to make them recede. Reggae vibrated through the car.

  Nina drove up into the hills. For a while the snow fell hard in thick, heavy flakes; Nina crept along on one narrow road and then another. But as she entered Washington, the snowfall stopped abruptly. After a few moments, it began again, but very lightly, like the beginning of the slow movement.

  The town was a dream of long-ago America. White colonial mansions in perfect condition surrounded a small green. There was no litter, no dirt, no advertising, no sign of poverty or conflict or anything unpleasant, not even evidence of how money was made. Pure white snow covered everything: the roofs of the white houses, the green, the limbs of the huge old oaks and spruces. She might have been in a crystal paperweight that a giant had just shaken gently to keep the snow falling. Nina turned down the radio and drove past the green.

  The post office was close by, opposite a Congregational church. Nina parked and went inside. Behind the counter stood the first human being she had seen in the town. He was a little man with protruding ears and a pointed tongue he was using to lick a FRAGILE—HANDLE WITH CARE sticker.

  “Can you give me directions?” Nina said. “I’m looking for the Standish Foundation.”

  “Foundation?” the man said, slapping the sticker on a parcel and tossing it on a pile behind him.

  “The Standish Foundation. Box one-oh-one.”

  “That’s Mrs. Standish,” the man said. “I don’t know about any foundation.” The word seemed to irritate him, as though it were some highfalutin import from a more sophisticated culture.

  “Right,” said Nina. “Can you tell me how to find her?”

  “You already know.”

  “I already know?”

  “Box one-oh-one.”

  A New York postal clerk might not have told her what she wanted either, but that would have been for his own enjoyment. This man was protecting Mrs. Standish’s privacy like some old retainer. “But I want to talk to her,” Nina said.

  The clerk looked her up and down, not in a sexual way, but more like a movie butler searching for signs of social status. “Is she expecting you?”

  “I don’t know her,” Nina replied. “But I’m passing through and an old friend of hers in Paris asked me to stop and say hello if I could.” She spoke casually, as though the clerk probably had lots of fri
ends in Paris too, and would understand the situation.

  The man rubbed the day-old growth on his chin, perhaps imagining a scene in the future when Mrs. Standish discovered that the wishes of her Parisian friend had been thwarted in the village post office. Then he picked up a stack of letters and with his back to Nina began sorting them into post boxes with quick, jabbing movements. “One-oh-nine east,” he said. “Take the third turning on the right. You’ll see a gate.”

  “Thank you,” Nina said. The clerk jammed Architectural Digest into someone’s slot.

  Nina found the third turning on the right about a mile past the last house in the town. It was an unplowed lane, densely lined on both sides with tall evergreens that darkened the sky and brushed the roof of the car. Deprived of traction, Nina’s rear wheels whined in the snow, from time to time biting into something solid and making the car lurch sideways. Nina, who seldom drove and never in conditions like these, was so intent on the steering wheel and the pedals that she almost went by the gate without seeing it. She pulled to the side of the lane, got out and walked back.

  The gate, mounted between two stone pillars in a narrow opening in the trees, was closed. It was made of narrowly separated wrought-iron bars topped high above with sharp-looking brass flourishes. Nina tried the handle and found it locked. She searched the pillars in vain for a bell or buzzer.

  Nina peered through the bars. Whiteness extended for acres toward a house in the distance, a monotone broken only by a few bare trees, and occasional wooden stakes suggesting garden plots under the snow. It was the sort of house the editors of Country Life liked to put on the cover: four stories high, with a main section and two perpendicular wings, all solid stone that would probably glow if the sun were shining.

  “Hello,” Nina called. “Hello!” She waved her arms in case anyone was watching from the house. There was no response. Then she shook the gate in case the lock had frozen, and tried it unsuccessfully again. After that, she just stood there in the snow, which fell more heavily now, growing cold. She saw no footprints, no tire tracks, no parked cars, no sign of life.

  People who lived in houses like this might not be around in December, Nina thought. She considered returning to the post office to ask if they were holding Mrs. Standish’s mail. But she didn’t want to go another round with the clerk. Instead she walked to the side of one of the stone pillars and tried to squeeze between it and the nearest tree. The tree was a spruce, so when Nina felt something prick her thigh she thought it was a needle and pushed on. Then something sharp dug into her, just below the cheekbone. She jerked back, hand on her face. When she removed it there was blood on her fingers. Nina carefully separated the branches and saw barbed wire. There were at least a dozen strands of it. Nina returned to the gate, again looked through and saw that the grounds were surrounded by an unbroken wall of evergreens. She walked twenty or thirty yards in one direction, then the other, parting the branches of the trees, finding barbed wire every time. She went back to the gate, stared at the snow, the garden stakes, the house. She got colder. Red dots appeared in the snow at her feet. Nina reached up and touched her cheek. This time there was more blood on her hand. She studied it for a few moments. Then she wedged her boots between the wrought iron bars and began climbing. First at Laura Bain’s, now here: she was becoming a habitual trespasser.

  Getting to the top of the gate was easy. The problems began after that. First, she had to somehow turn around and climb down the other side. Second, the brass flourishes at the tips of the wroughtiron bars proved to be as sharp as they looked. Third, the ground seemed much farther away than she had expected. With her hands on the cold bars, Nina raised one foot and placed it on top of a brass point. Then she released her hands, one by one, and gripped the bars from the other side, with her thumbs at the bottom. Now all that remained was a simple raising of the other foot, with a quick pivot and an equally quick change of grip so that her thumbs would once more be on top. It was neatly planned, like a big meeting at work. She could even picture herself doing it. Nina pictured herself doing it a few times. Then she tried it.

  The foot raising was perfect, the pivot quick. But the grip change didn’t happen. Instead Nina heard a ripping sound, felt pain on the back of her leg, saw the sky: solid gray clouds that tilted suddenly toward rising trees in the distance. Then she heard a thump, a thump that seemed to originate inside her chest. It knocked all the air out of her lungs. Nina tried to breathe some back in, and found she could not.

  She lay on her back in the snow, gasping for air. Slowly her breathing returned to normal. She sat up, examined the long tear in the back of one of her pant legs and the deep scratch in the skin, shook snow out of her collar. Except for the blood, the experience reminded her of a ski trip she had taken with one of The Boyfriends. Nina rose and walked toward the house.

  The driveway had not been plowed, but snowbanks on either side made it easy to follow. As she neared the house she saw it was even bigger than she had thought, and luxurious in detail: leaded windows, stained glass, an open colonnade on the second floor. The entrance was a massive double door with a stained-glass rondelle of the head of a Gothic angel in each. Nina saw a button in the stone wall beside the door and pressed it.

  Chimes rang in the house. Then there was silence. Nina pressed the button again. Chimes rang. Silence. Nina was reaching for the button once more when she heard a click and the door opened.

  A silver-haired woman stood in the doorway. Beside her was the biggest, sleekest, blackest Doberman Nina had ever seen. Its eyes were on her. They didn’t like what they saw. The muscles in the dog’s back rose in rigid planes and it barked angrily.

  “Quiet, Zulu,” the woman said, not raising her voice, or touching or looking at the dog. Zulu stopped barking at once, but his muscles remained flexed. The woman was looking at Nina’s cheek. “Yes?” she said.

  “Mrs. Standish?” Nina said.

  “Correct.”

  Nina had rehearsed a little opening, but it had lost its coherence in her fall. That, and Mrs. Standish’s appearance, made her pause. She doubted that Mrs. Standish had ever wished that some feature of her face or body were different. She had perfect bones, perfect skin, perfect bearing. Except for the thick, silver hair hanging down past her shoulders and the deep-set eyes with irises so uniformly and brightly blue they might have been ceramic rather than human tissue, Mrs. Standish could have passed for someone Nina’s age. In charcoal gray tweed with a diamond necklace and sapphire earrings she might have been expecting the photographer from Country Life at any moment. The only incongruity was the little blue sweater that hung from the knitting needles in her hand. She had one sleeve to finish.

  “I’m Nina Kitchener,” Nina said.

  The deep-set eyes met hers. “Do I know you?” Mrs. Standish asked. “I don’t think I do.”

  “You don’t,” Nina said. “But I’ve come from New York. I’m hoping you can help me.”

  “How is that?”

  “It’s about the Human Fertility Institute.”

  “The Human Fertility Institute?”

  “It’s owned by the Standish Foundation, isn’t it?”

  “Oh dear,” said Mrs. Standish. “I’m afraid you’re too late.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I believe we sold it recently. I can’t remember quite to whom.”

  “Standard Foods. A straight swap for shares.”

  “My goodness,” said Mrs. Standish. “You know more about my affairs than I do.”

  “I hope not,” Nina told her.

  Mrs. Standish smiled. Her teeth were small, white, perfect; the smile complex. “You’ve cut your face,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Come in. I’ve got Band-Aids in the kitchen.”

  Nina stepped into the house. The dog growled and blocked her way.

  “Zulu,” said Mrs. Standish. “Be nice.”

  Zulu stopped growling. He let Nina pass, but rubbed his hard muzzle against her hip as s
he went by. She followed Mrs. Standish through a hall with a pink and white marble floor. A martyrdom of Saint Sebastian hung on the opposite wall. The saint, much larger than life, was suffering horribly, beseeching eyes on the heavens. Nina didn’t need to read the signature to know it was an El Greco.

  Many doors opened off the corridor. Nina glimpsed Persian rugs, plush furniture, paintings, tapestries, sculptures. The corridor made a ninety-degree turn into one of the wings of the house and they entered the kitchen. It had a freezer, two refrigerators, two big ovens and a microwave, and a wall hung with copper pots and pans, but nothing was cooking. There was no smell of food, no bowl of fruit, no dishes in the sink, no sign that anything ever had been cooking. Mrs. Standish opened a cupboard and took out a brown bottle and a box of bandages.

  “Come into the light,” she said.

  Nina moved to a window. It looked out on the hills at the back of the house. At their base stood a stone cottage. A wheelbarrow full of snow rested by the door and smoke rose from the chimney.

  “Let’s have a look,” Mrs. Standish said, taking Nina’s chin in one hand and peering at the cut on her cheek. Mrs. Standish’s hand was cold; she smelled of some perfume that reminded Nina of roses, but mixed with the roses, faintly but unmistakably, was the smell of fresh sweat.

  “Quite shallow,” Mrs. Standish said. “I shouldn’t think you’ll need stitches.” She let go of Nina’s chin, uncapped the brown bottle and dipped a Q-tip into it. “This might sting a bit,” she said, taking Nina’s chin in one hand again and dabbing at her cheek with the Q-tip.

  Perhaps because she was unprepared for more than a little sting, Nina was unable to stifle her cry of pain, or stop her head from snapping back: it felt as though Mrs. Standish had sunk a hot needle into her face. The deep-set eyes watched impassively.

  “What the hell was that?” Nina said.

  “Just some iodine,” Mrs. Standish replied. “You don’t want an infection, do you?”