by John Farrow
“What do you mean? What happened?”
She cleared her throat. “One of our patients was murdered. Smothered with a pillow.”
Honigwachs offered back a quizzical expression. He seemed unimpressed. “He had a friend, I’m guessing. It was a mercy killing.”
“Well, whoever the friend was who snuffed him, also took the trouble to sew his lips together with a needle and thread.”
“What?”
“I’ve been going over it in my head. Andy was in New York then.”
“What are you saying? Come on, Camille. You’re getting out there.”
She lowered her voice so that he had to lean in to hear her. “How much do you really know about him? That’s all I’m asking. If you think about it, you don’t know Andy from Adam. He’s a hooligan, with the charm of an angel. But what do you know? So think about it, Werner. At the very least, be careful around him.”
He slumped back in the booth, and exhaled. “Oh God,” he murmured.
Placing her elbows on the table, Camille crossed her arms. “This is what I’m thinking. We’ll have our little playgroup to get to the bottom of all this. Me, Lucy, Charlie, Andy. By bringing in Charlie, I get Lucy to trust me. Because I’m bringing in a cop, it’s a sign of my commitment, it proves that I want to know the truth just as much as she does, that I’ve got nothing to hide. Charlie will be anxious to defend me, but clueless. He’ll let me know everything that comes through from the cop side of things. Me and Andy, we’ll be on your side in all this, only Andy won’t know where I’m coming from, so I get to keep an honest eye on him. Meanwhile, Lucy will be fighting her little fight, not knowing what’s really happening. It’s the only way, Wiener. I know Lucy. She’s a demon! We can’t let her take things out of our hands. Don’t forget, I’ve got exposure here. I can be identified. I’m looking out for myself, not just you.”
Werner Honigwachs studied her awhile. “You’ve been thinking about this.”
“Somebody has to.” She sipped her coffee.
“We need to know what they know.” He spoke as though the course of action being suggested was his own.
“That’s right. And if they learn more, we need to know that, too.”
Honigwachs nodded. “There’s a point—” he began to say.
“I know,” Camille said softly. “I just can’t bear to think about it. I won’t think about it.”
“If Andy is working for them against us—”
“No, please, don’t think that way. Andy would cause such trouble! You know what I’m talking about.”
Honigwachs engaged her eyes. “There’s no immunity here. None. If someone needs to be removed from the scene, I won’t hesitate.”
“Please, don’t talk that way. Would you even have the guts to do it?”
Honigwachs narrowed his gaze, continuing to nod, a rhythmic, menacing bob of his chin. “We’re not there yet. But Andy would have to be finessed, if it came down to that.”
“Oh, God. You would, wouldn’t you? You’d have the guts?”
Honigwachs put his two fists together, side by side, facing forward. He then made a snapping motion, as though breaking a twig in half. “I think first,” he told her. “When I act, I act. This is my time. I can feel it. I can feel how everything has been ordained. Nobody will step in my way. There’s no point being stupid, but if I have to take out Lucy, I will take out Lucy. I’d do it right now, but I need to know what she knows. I need to know who she’s talked to. Andy? Him too. Don’t doubt me on that one.”
Camille remained quiet, observing him for a while, then averting her gaze.
“It’s a rough business,” Honigwachs chided her. “You have to be in it for the whole game. Don’t go squeamish on me, we don’t have time for that.”
“Don’t speak of these things,” she whispered. “Never again. Not aloud. Not in public.”
He gazed at her coldly. “Stay on top of things, Camille. I want detailed, perfect reports of your meetings with the others. We won’t go down that road unless it’s absolutely necessary. But I need information.”
“I’m on top of it. Now, tell me, Wiener, what about the science? Have we done it? Did we find what we’re after? Have we marked the integrase enzyme yet?”
For the first time, he allowed a smidgen of a smile to sunny his sombre disposition. “I’ve talked to Largent. He thinks we’ve found the marker. He’ll write up the tests as if they were performed on rats. That requires a certain amount of translation, and after that we’ll pass the data through to Harry Hillier. It won’t be long after that. Harry’s brilliant, he’ll locate the marker and figure out how to exploit it, at least in theory. He’ll think he’s won the Nobel Prize.”
“Maybe he will.”
Honigwachs laughed. “Whatever makes him happy. As long as I come away with about eight billion or more, they can elect him Pope for all I care.”
“You’ll get the check here, rich man? I have to scoot. Carole’s in the car.”
He nodded.
Camille covered one of his hands in hers and leaned very close. “You’re the brains behind all this, Wiener. You set up the science, you set up the money end. Just remember, when the time came to get the job done properly and quickly you needed me. Hang tough. That’s your only job right now. Don’t think such dire thoughts! Everything will work as long as we do what has to be done. One little crisis with Lucy won’t wreck anything.”
She popped up from the booth then, excited by the next challenge. She wrapped herself up warmly and headed out.
She found Carole behind the wheel, pretending to drive, the keys in the ignition, the engine still running. A couple who had emerged from a Dodge Caravan were dismayed, but Camille Choquette murmured, “Lighten up,” under her breath, and rewarded her daughter with a bright, happy smile. Then she discovered that her child had locked the doors.
“Open up, Carole. Open up for Mommy.”
The little girl shook her head and stuck out her tongue.
Camille showed her the grilled cheese sandwich. “Do you want Mommy to throw it in the snow?”
Carole thought about that, and decided in the end that she’d rather unlock the front door. Her mother crawled in and commanded her to jump into the back seat. “Just for that little charade,” Camille told her tersely, “I’m eating your sandwich myself. You’ll just have to starve today.”
That brought on protests and tears, and through it all Camille Choquette, driving away from the restaurant, made exaggerated sounds of pleasure as she consumedthegrilledcheese. “Yummy,”shesaid.
“Yummy, yummy in the tummy.” The little girl pounded her fists against the back of the front passenger seat and wailed and her mother thought that that also was funny. She held up the final bite. Carole ceased her tantrum, hoping that it might be for her. Camille gave her a big smile in the rear-view mirror. “Pop!” She laughed, just before the bite vanished into her own mouth, and she chewed extravagantly while the child, astonished, stared at her with teary eyes, too shocked to bawl.
That week, Thursday, February j,
and Sunday, February 6, 1999
The three conspirators decided to meet at Lucy’s house.
For reasons both apparent and unknown, each was wildly suspicious of the others. Andrew and Camille both believed that Lucy would be difficult to manage. She’d be obstinate in the face of any pragmatic proposal if it did not appeal to her intensely passionate nature. For her part, Lucy couldn’t understand how Camille had been able to stick to the format of her job. Yes, she was supposed to examine the lab rats in the field and report her findings, but they were talking about human beings! Found dead and dying! How had she gone about her analytical work, calm and detached, as if detailing the march of a minor flu?
In the past, they had always managed to help people. The sick had been revived. The dying had had their days prolonged and the quality of their life improved. Suddenly, their patients had failed rapidly, succumbing overnight to a catalogue of plagues that relent
lessly stalked them, now successfully. Yes, there had always been risks associated with administering untried drugs, but they had always had a beneficial, or at least a benign, result. That Camille had been witness to the carnage and had simply gone on about her work, just like always, as in the good old days of their successes, disturbed Lucy a great deal.
And Andy, why hadn’t he returned to her room in Baltimore and warned her to stop? How could he have assumed that Luc would do that job? His explanation didn’t wash.
Andy and Camille were leery of one another also. To Andy, Lucy’s passionate conviction to help people made sense, it was true to her nature, but Camille seemed a cold fish to him, aloof. He did not know her well enough to say what motivated her, nor could he evaluate how she’d hold up under pressure. From the beginning, he had accepted her because Lucy did so, he’d gone along with her judgment. That Lucy was now distrustful raised a warning flag.
In turn, Camille distrusted him. She had heard through Honigwachs that he was vaguely linked to organized crime, whatever that might mean, but she also held to a private conviction that the poor boy was in love, and love could be a dangerous tonic to antisocial, criminal behaviour. People had been known to change, go straight, mend their ways to serve the tyranny of love. Even if he was trustworthy, lust or infatuation could distract him, cause him to slip. Camille would watch for any sign of weakness in him.
As Lucy answered Camille’s knock, Andy was coming up the driveway in a rusty blue Chevy. He always seemed to be in a different vehicle. Camille was wearing a cockeyed smile and there were tears in her eyes, and at that signal Lucy did capitulate. The two friends hugged.
“Oh, baby,” Camille whimpered, “this is so terrifying! It’s so awful!” Both women wore jeans, as if their choice of clothes set the tone for the job ahead. It was time to work, to get things done, and to be practical. Nodding, the faces of dead friends they had both known vivid in her head, Lucy gave her pal another fierce hug.
Andrew Stettler was chugging up the stairs to her apartment above the garage. “Good,” he said upon entering, “we’re all here. Let’s get down to it.”
They thrashed things through. Being together proved their desire to tackle their problems as a group, but the discussion unearthed the doubts each had, and those had to be resolved.
“What Lucy’s saying, Andy,” Camille explained, “is that she doesn’t buy it. You left her alone in Baltimore without telling her that she was killing people.”
“Luc would tell her!” Andy protested, not for the first time.
“She doesn’t buy into that theory.”
“Well,” Andy reiterated, appearing contrite, “it’s not a theory. It’s the truth.”
Believing that Andy had been compromised by love, Camille encouraged Lucy to badger him, to see how he might respond. Stettler stood his ground. He had gone down to Baltimore with a job to do.
“I called Camille,” he explained for the fifth time. “Together we decided that things had gotten out of hand. I told Luc, then got on a plane.”
The explanation confirmed for Camille that Andrew Stettler was indeed the source of the leak—he had told Lucy, through Luc, about the deaths. But Camille now had to take into account the part that Luc had played in events, facts she hadn’t been in possession of before. Luc had been treated by Lucy and had quickly failed. Sooner or later, Lucy would have understood the truth for herself, whether or not Andy told her. Sooner, obviously, was proving to be a problem, but telling her had not been fatal, given that she’d had evidence travelling alongside her, in the company of poor Luc. So his indiscretion, under the circumstances, was explainable. As well, Andy had been placed in a tough position, as his own friend was being treated and so was in mortal danger.
“How did that make you feel?” Camille asked him. Only after she had posed the question did she realize that it was inappropriate, given her position here. She was supposed to be one of them, not an agent for Honigwachs. She had wanted to know how he felt about the situation as a conspirator, but she was not supposed to have that information.
“What?”
She had to push on. “Luc being sick. How did that make you feel?”
“Listen,” he said, and he placed a hand over his heart in an overt gesture of sincerity, “I’ve been a lab rat myself. You don’t think that every time you inject somebody he doesn’t have a twinge of fear, a worry? In New York you told me that things were bad. Then I find out that a buddy of mine is really sick, and it makes me wonder. I called for your latest report. I was hoping you’d tell me that things were getting better. That it was a freak situation. But that wasn’t the answer you gave me. So I told Luc the bad news, then headed home, because this was a major security issue, and my job at BioLogika happens to be security.”
The response, as Camille analysed it, suited the discussion alive in the room. She knew that Andy had already known that men were dying. He had been in on it from the beginning. He was privy to whatever Honigwachs knew. But what had possessed him to contact her? If he had already anticipated the problems he was facing now, then he was just plain brilliant, a genius in matters of deception. She admired him, but at the same time her antennae warned her to be careful. His explanation, she noted, did serve to placate Lucy.
“What about you?” Andy asked Camille. “Weren’t you freaking out when you found people dead or dying? Didn’t you report back with that?”
“Who to, bozo? The people behind this don’t want to hear from us. Let’s say it’s Honigwachs. We can assume it’s Honigwachs. But you know, he doesn’t ever come out and say so. Nobody ever comes out and says they’re doing it, or what we’re doing is for them. I get my marching orders on the sly, secretly, coded. When things go wrong, like they did this time, I don’t exactly have anybody to complain to, or to ask for advice. In this organization, you got to understand, the buck stops nowhere.”
“I don’t know, Camille,” Lucy interjected, “we’re talking about people dying.”
“No, no, listen to me, I did call Honigwachs. I did call Randall Largent. They didn’t want to hear from me. I kept trying to code it for them, to let them know that somehow they had to reach me and talk to me. When Andy showed up in New York, and then called from Baltimore, I figured that that was it. That was their way of getting in touch. Andy, I believed you were acting for the higher-ups, that that was my chance to let people know what was happening. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have told you everything I did.”
She thought that she was pretty brilliant, too—up there in the same league with Andrew Stettler—but Lucy did not seem to share the same impression.
“You set up the schedule, Camille, you could’ve found some way to track me down to stop me.”
A difficult point to counter. Camille knew right away that she was in trouble here. “The schedule had gone kaflooey, remember? Not to mention, do you have any idea what it was like for me? Lucy, how did you feel when you found out about it? And you only heard about it word of mouth, a rumour maybe, nothing confirmed. Me, everyday I had to go into the houses of people who had lost their loved ones. I had to ask them really personal questions about the progress of the disease. I had to find out what this was all about. I had to visit the dying. Do you know, can you imagine, the torment they were in? I was upset, I was scared, I was trying to get in touch with Montreal and have them do something. I didn’t believe what was right in front of my eyes. I thought about trying to get in touch with you, but how easy was that? I was in a daze, Lucy.”
The speech was the best that she could do, but it didn’t really clear up all the issues regarding her behaviour.
Camille added, “I’m sorry. I guess I screwed up.” She kept her eyes downcast.
“It’s understandable,” Andy offered, “under the circumstances. It’s not like anybody was prepared for this. The question is, what are we going to do? The two of you are in trouble, no matter how you look at it, but laying the blame on each other—I don’t see how that works for anybody.”
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br /> Lucy was tense, taut. She was sitting with her legs apart and her elbows on her knees. She covered her face with her hands, as though to conceal or perhaps contain her fury. She felt confused, apologetic and accusatory, and certainly she did not know what to do and had no solutions to propose.
Across from her, in the deep cushions of a sofa, Camille opted to play her magic card. In a weak position here, she had not been able to properly explain an aspect of her behaviour. She needed to elevate her position, and she needed to be trusted. “I think,” she proposed, “that you guys should let me tell Charlie.”
The suggestion altered the current in the room.
“What the hell for?” Andy asked.
“What are you thinking, Camille? Go straight to jail? Do not pass Go?”
She raised her hands in an attitude of surrender, but forged on with her argument. “I know it sounds weird. But Charlie loves me. I can explain it to him. I can paint it so that he has to save me, and that means saving Lucy. He can help us through the legal stuff. He might be able to contribute with a side-investigation of his own. At the same time, if we get into trouble, he can tip us off. I mean, it’s golden. My boyfriend’s a cop. Right now, that could be the motherlode.”
Lucy sighed and shifted her weight around. “He’s not exactly a big-shot cop.”
“He’s not exactly big” Andy put in, hoping to add a touch of levity.
Both Lucy and Camille did laugh, a little.
Camille took them up on their criticisms, using their points to her advantage. “That’s what I’m saying. He’s a cop, but not true blue. Nobody likes him on the force, they think he’s a little guy with family connections. So he’ll work on our side, I’m sure of it, because he doesn’t give a damn about other cops. He’s no hotshot, Lucy, but he has rank. He has—what’s the word? Latitude, you know? He can help.”
That night they couldn’t resolve the issue, despite talking it through repeatedly. A few days later, Lucy finally relented. She was willing to let Charlie Painchaud help them out, hoping that he would guide her through the legal entanglements and keep her out of trouble. Almost any gambit seemed worth a try—doing nothing irritated her the most. Andy hated the idea, but when he brought the notion on the sly to Werner Honigwachs his boss advised him to go along with it. He explained that they’d have an inside track on what the cops were thinking. Sooner or later, he forewarned, cops would be involved. In the long run, it was better to have one around that Andy could befriend. Reluctantly, Stettler agreed—he had little choice—and Charlie Painchaud became part of the counter-conspiracy.