Bradstreet Gate: A Novel

by Robin Kirman

  Pride, Storrow had said, but it was resentment Charlie felt lurking in his old professor. Storrow had lost so much after the murder, so much that Charlie had to boast of now: prospects; youth; the ordinary comforts, too, of living unharassed, of being admired by one’s society rather than reviled.

  Storrow raised his forefinger; it hovered in front of Charlie’s face. “You don’t even realize how good you have it. The future of defense, it’s going to be based on guys like you: corporations, not government agencies. Those agency guys are afraid to let you see how much power you have—they’re dinosaurs and they know it, so they mean to keep you down, long as they can, a beggar for contracts, but that’s where I can help you.”

  “I see.” Yes, he did see: too late, what a stupid coward he’d been to agree to this meeting. He’d known exactly how it had to end: Storrow would try to get in on his business, muscle for a position.

  Storrow heaved himself up on his stool; he’d grown heavier, but no less strong. An athlete still, at his age.

  “With someone like me to advise you, I’m telling you, you can be ten times what you are now.”

  “I’m not anything now, that’s my point; I don’t even have a staff or payroll yet. We’re just at the initial stages—”

  “Which is precisely when you need a strategy—a global one. America’s just one player here; you know who the world’s biggest weapons importer is? It’s India. Military budget of over twelve billion this year, ahead of Russia. And they’re only going to grow—they’ve got Pakistan to keep up with, and China, too. Spending’s going to double and triple in the next decade, and I’ve got this on good authority, Charlie. I’ve got contacts; I’ve got experience, perspective. You need to consider this seriously, Charlie, what we could do together, you and me.”

  Impossible: there must not be a “you and me.” No way he could bring in Storrow, even if he wanted to: the association to such an unsteady character, an accused murderer and professor publicly disgraced. Absolutely not.

  “I’m afraid it’s not my call.”

  “Dammit, Charlie. Everything’s your call. That’s just what I’m trying to show you. You can’t let these agency guys bully you. You need to have other deals going; you can’t let them think you need them too much. Forget loyalty; there’s no such thing as trust with these people. They’ll lie and call you crazy; they’ll lie to make you crazy and then, when they have no more use for you, they don’t know you anymore.”

  It might be true, what he was saying: at least as far as Storrow’s story went. Charlie looked into the man’s eyes, glistening, overbright. What had happened back at school, had it driven him over the edge or had his unraveling begun sooner—was there more to Storrow’s history than Charlie knew?

  “You listen to me, son: at our level, nothing is forgiven, no mistakes.” Storrow was peering at him, sternly. “One shot and this is yours. Do you get me? This is it. You’re it now. Or you can be, with me.”

  “I’m it?”

  “It. It. The insider. The top. The new aristocracy.”

  He’s serious, thought Charlie. Mad, maybe, but serious.

  Storrow turned on his stool to face him. Despite his dishevelment, Storrow’s features were perfect still: eerily symmetrical, with that neat blue line bisecting his forehead. Charlie recalled how much the man had once impressed him, those patrician looks and manners, the golden boy he’d been.

  All at once it struck him, that Storrow’s modified appearance might be about more than going incognito: the earlier model had proven obsolete. Before him sat a Storrow for the new millennium—jeans, worn jacket, almost like the one that Charlie owned, the one he’d worn that night he’d passed Storrow in the bar.

  Could it be? Six years after he’d striven to resemble men like Storrow, Storrow meant to make some kind of model out of him?

  Charlie stood, rather abruptly, and reached for his wallet to pay. “My flight, I’m sorry. We’ll have to pick this up another time.”

  “Make sure we do.” Storrow swiveled, rocking slightly; his head was heavy with alcohol. “I wouldn’t have called today—I wouldn’t be suggesting what I am, if I didn’t know you want it too. Triathlon Technologies. I got your message, son.”

  “Sorry, I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Triathlon, Charlie.”

  Only then did it dawn on him, the connection Storrow had made. Charlie recalled that first housemaster’s dinner and the photograph on display in the living room of Apthorp House: Storrow, young, fit, among his West Point teammates in a moment of triumph.

  “My sport, son. My bloody sport.”

  Storrow slid from his stool onto his feet; he drew back his shoulders and stood to his full height. Something familiar shone in his tense and reddened face, something of Charlie’s own father: behind the paternal veneer, envy and contempt, the conviction that, however successful Charlie might become, he was a weakling, a worm that might be flattened without effort, without remorse, with only—from real men like them—a slight tremor of disgust.

  “I’ll see what I can do.” He’d have said anything to escape from Storrow then.

  “Good man.” Storrow laid his palm on the hot nape of Charlie’s neck.

  A touch like that, so familiar—six years ago it would have pleased him.

  22

  Georgia’s dreams of India began after Mark’s readmittance, for the second time since the surgery, to the cancer center at Mass General. Winter was encroaching, the brutal Boston cold unlike any she’d known in the desert and tropical countries where she and Mark had lived over the past four years. Her mother had been urging her to move to Santa Cruz, but Georgia was determined to remain where she was: in that heavily mortgaged, freshly decorated, South End bow-front row house, where, just that fall, she and Mark had brought their newborn daughter home.

  Violet had been a quiet baby for the first month, but now, since she and Georgia were alone in that big house, she cried incessantly. Her howls reached across the walls into the adjacent buildings, brought neighbors knocking in the night on their front door. They even reached all the way to India, penetrating the marble walls of Georgia’s dreams.

  The dream was recurring, with slight variations, sometimes several times a week. Georgia would find herself walking down an opulent corridor, hung with chandeliers and flanked with large vases filled with flowers, white roses like those she sent each May to the Patels. Begging children pursued her, their clothes filthy and tattered. One girl carried a wailing infant; a boy was dragging something strange behind him on the ground. Straps and cords, a stethoscope, a tourniquet: a knot of medical equipment, tubes tangled like intestines.

  A door opened at the end of the hall and Mrs. Gupta stepped forward; her face was full of pity; she placed a hand over her mouth.

  Then came the dread, a sensation sharp enough to jolt Georgia out of sleep. Sometimes she would wake with a cry and disturb Violet. For the next hours, while she gave Violet her pacifier, stroked and rocked her, kicking her own shins to keep from falling back asleep and letting the baby drop, her thoughts returned to that brief nine days in India, to Nandi and to Storrow, and to the menace she’d felt then, before she’d left for Kenya where she’d gone on to find Mark, and her future.

  —

  She’d flown to Kenya that winter because she felt she had nowhere else to go: the only placement Global Aid could offer was assisting in the Marsabit Hospice, located in a remote, eastern province town. It was the same position she’d turned down from D.C. the month before, but this time, she took it; she had to get out of India, and she couldn’t admit failure and return to the States so soon.

  For three weeks she applied herself to her new job: she followed the nurses’ instructions, performed every task they requested, however foul, and when there was nothing more for her to do, held the hands of withered patients who moaned to her in words she couldn’t understand. She bore the heat and the mosquitoes, the flying roaches, the stench of the water in the bath and sink of her cru
mbling hut, until her body simply rebelled and she succumbed to fever.

  She couldn’t stir from her room; she struggled to leave her bed to call the hospice. Her sheets were soaked through with sweat, her teeth chattered and her throat was so parched she could scarcely eat or speak. These symptoms didn’t much concern her new colleagues—standard, they said, for newcomers to Africa—but she’d never so acutely felt her own mortality. She lost ten pounds in as many days, until one of the doctors finally suggested she move into the hospice, where she could be supervised by staff, and where she began to suspect she’d meet her end among its patients, her short life a morbid, cautionary tale: run anywhere you like, away from troubles, fears, regrets—in the end, death will be waiting.

  When she was at her sickest, Mark arrived: a young doctor radiating good cheer and competence. A fellow American come by chance to visit a French nurse he’d befriended the year before in a hospital in Jordan. There was, as Georgia came to learn, an active social scene among these young medical professionals abroad: a community of like-minded explorers, some of the most affable people she had yet to meet. None, it seemed, was more beloved than Mark, whom the French doctor had sent to her knowing that Mark, with his easy manner and his Johns Hopkins degree, would manage to reassure her when no one else could. There was something about his face—quietly handsome, topped with wavy light brown hair—and his voice, too, deep and steady, that allowed her to believe him when he repeated the prognosis others had given her ten times before: she’d caught a frightening, but far from fatal, local virus. In a week, she would be well enough to rise from bed and get the hell out of that place.

  They’d joked about where she might go next—by now Global Aid owed her a trip to the Swiss Alps or St. Tropez—and then, on an especially sweltering afternoon, during one of Mark’s longer and longer bedside visits, they resolved in earnest to set off from Kenya together. Mark was assigned for three months to a hospital in Marrakech—not the Riviera but a step up from the village where Georgia was staying. A whole house was waiting for him there, and she was welcome to share it while she figured out her plans. Never would Georgia have guessed that such a temporary arrangement would lead to marriage. But Mark proved her perfect companion: open to adventure, playful and kind. From Marrakech they moved together to a village outside Cairo, where he joined the staff at the local hospital and she took a position with a British NGO.

  About two months into their stay in Egypt, Georgia’s father phoned to announce his impending arrival. Georgia had been in touch with him from Marrakech and, since then, her father had arranged a lecture at the American university in Cairo that would cover travel costs. He’d fly in a week early, bring his latest girlfriend, take some photos, and drop by for a short visit with his daughter.

  When Georgia and Mark came to collect her father at Cairo International, Mr. Calvin was alone; the girlfriend, he explained, had been unwilling to miss her first week of spring classes—she’d just begun her master’s in film at NYU. No hardship, Georgia felt: she and Mark would be spared the awkwardness of sharing their house with her father and a lover even younger than she was. The three of them in three small rooms would be difficult enough, though Mark had quickly understood what the arrangement—and her father’s ego—demanded of him: he spent long hours every day at work, so as not to intrude upon their time together.

  Her father, for his part, chose to misread such thoughtfulness: Mark was avoiding him, he claimed—if not to conceal some major flaw then maybe to simply conceal how little self there was to hide. Rather a lean personality was how her father described him: confusing, Georgia felt, Mark’s tolerance with blandness.

  “You might try to get to know him just a bit,” she suggested, “before you thoroughly dismiss him.”

  Afterward, she urged Mark to let her father join him at the clinic for a day. Her father went, toting his camera, and returned that night silent on the subject of Mark’s talents as a doctor, but full of praise for the pictures he’d taken at the clinic—remarkable stuff—which he unassumingly attributed to the beauty of the Egyptian children.

  “Probably it’s hard to notice,” he said to Mark, “while you’re examining their bodies for infections and dysfunctions.”

  “I think I can see beauty, even so.” Mark squeezed Georgia’s hand under the table.

  “Sure you can, but if you’re taught to think of it in terms of rods and cones, even seeing starts to look different, doesn’t it?” Her father smiled at her askance: a conspiratorial look that she recalled from dinners throughout her childhood, meant to exclude her mother and the larger world, to unite them in their singular perception.

  Later that night, when she was getting into bed and Mark was in the shower, her father slipped into her bedroom to make her a proposition. Several galleries in Europe had been after him about a show; as long as he was taking a semester off from teaching, he might spend the next months in Rome or Barcelona and she could stay there with him. “I could insist you’re my curator. You can get back to working in the arts again.”

  “And Mark?”

  She’d given the guy five months, her father said: “Seems like more than enough.”

  Instead, it was her father she’d had enough of, she decided. Ten months later, she was hardly speaking to her father, while she and Mark remained very happily together: arranging a next move to Southeast Asia. After a year in Bangkok, they moved again, to Myanmar and then, eighteen months later, to Haiti.

  She was drifting, according to her mother, who was in rare agreement with her ex-husband on the matter of Georgia’s romantic commitment. Nothing against Mark personally, but no relationship was worth the sacrifices Georgia was making: she ought to return to her work at the National Gallery or else follow up on her plans to seek better prospects in New York or elsewhere. Love wasn’t something to be relied on, said her mother; later, Georgia would regret letting a man keep her from developing her professional life.

  But Georgia didn’t care if, as her mother pointed out, she was already bound to be less successful than her overachieving classmates. Mark was good for her in a hundred other ways; beside him, she’d grown more loving and stable and responsible—perhaps even up to a responsibility as immense as motherhood. When she’d discovered she was pregnant, she could reasonably believe that this child also had a chance at happiness, that she’d found a father who could correct for every wrong her own father had done her and any harm she might do, too. Where she was lacking, Mark would compensate, and the child would be for him, above all, because he wanted one as much as, mysteriously, he wished to spend his life with her.

  Nine weeks into Georgia’s pregnancy, Mark announced he’d applied for a position at Massachusetts General. She hadn’t been sure, at first, if returning to the States was what she wanted. For four years, she’d felt no longing for the country she’d left behind: not for its landscapes or entertainments or conveniences, nor for family or for friends. The only person she ever missed was Charlie, but their friendship had been damaged, it seemed, beyond repair. During the one nervous call she’d made from Mumbai, Charlie had been cold and dismissive; he hadn’t answered her subsequent postcards, nor had Alice. Their silence only served to remind Georgia of the tenuousness of her closest relationships and recall the upsets she’d escaped, so it came as a surprise when the prospect of a child inspired in her a yearning to touch back on familiar soil.

  In June, Mark was invited for an interview in Boston; Georgia flew over with him. She’d been apprehensive about revisiting that city, but the child she carried helped her to keep her thoughts fixed on the future. With her hand resting on her belly, and Mark holding her arm, she’d felt able to explore the neighborhoods south of the Charles, places she’d glimpsed only distantly on runs during her school days. A week later, when Mark was offered the position at Mass General, they went strolling through South End, looking at homes for sale among the blocks of bow-front houses. Georgia was taken aback by how joyful the scene made her: all those fresh gr
een lawns with strollers parked out front. From there, she and Mark soon found themselves in meetings with a mortgage broker at the bank. The next month was spent installing a backyard garden and driving to auctions to select furniture charming and individual enough to make a home within those walls. They’d even gotten married in the house, with two neighbors as witnesses, and Mark’s mother, in from Seattle, as the only family present.

  Neither of Georgia’s parents was invited. Their example, after all, had nearly been enough to spoil her on marriage, though Mark had managed to convince her to do it for the insurance: as a doctor, he knew well what childbirth could cost. It had been an antiromantic joke, a way of indulging her skepticism yet binding them together—a joke that seemed far less funny now that Georgia spent more time speaking to insurance representatives than to Mark, now that the hospital had come to feel more like their marital home than the one they’d so lovingly arranged.

  Georgia had scarcely recovered from the birth, and Mark was only in his first week back at work, when he came home, midday, pale and stunned. He’d had an accident, thought Georgia, or else his mother had, or hers: a dozen awful possibilities sprang to mind, but he’d refused to tell her what the trouble was until they’d put Violet in her stroller and headed out. During their walk around the neighborhood, he’d admitted he’d been unwell. At first he’d only felt fatigued, but lately he’d had pains in his stomach and his back. He hadn’t wished to say anything to Georgia while she was dealing with the pregnancy and birth, but he’d been examined by a fellow doctor at the hospital and had undergone some diagnostic tests: an MRI and an endoscopic ultrasound and biopsy. The results had come back that afternoon. Pancreatic cancer.

  “The good news is, it’s resectable,” he said.

  “Which means?”

  In his most reassuring tone, the same he’d used to set her at ease in Kenya, years before, he let her know what the next months would require. He would undergo chemo and then surgery, a Whipple—to remove his gallbladder, bile duct, parts of the pancreas and stomach and intestine.