Days of Night

by Jonathan Stone

  “As everyone here knows, as everyone here senses and feels, this is not just about Trish Wong. This is about something more than Trish. This is, yes, about saying goodbye to her, but about preparing, if need be, to say a larger goodbye too. Learning, preparing, to say goodbye to a way of life. To a point of view. A larger farewell. The voyage of her soul—the voyage of our own souls.”

  He looks around, examines their faces individually, speaks more quietly. “Does it feel inappropriate to take this moment about Trish and expand on it? Use it? Do something more with it? Make it not about her, but about us? I’m doing it because we seem to be entering a time when our expectations will be challenged. When we will have to rethink everything. When we will have to respect our traditions but make our own new ones.

  “We are not keeping her body to send home later. Because we don’t really know if we’ll be able to do that come spring. We don’t know if we’ll be able to do it at all. Let’s be honest. We are preparing for a new world here. A world that we will do our best to create reasonably and practically and humanely, but a world that will surprise us. That we are unprepared for. That we will do our best to shape but that, more realistically, will be shaping us.

  “And part of this new world will be death. Death hopefully for the fewest of us possible, but death nonetheless. Because even if we are successful here, there will be death.

  “Trish’s came too early. But isn’t that how it comes for us all?”

  His eyes narrow. “We all know, as we stand here, that Trish’s killer is here among us. We will find you. Yes, we are distracted and preoccupied by the needs of survival right now, but trust me, we will find you, and you will pay a price, and I hope that we can discover why you have done this, but even if there is no why, that will not keep us from meting out justice.”

  And unsaid—which they are realizing, some faster, some slower—Trish Wong’s funeral is a kind of funeral for all of them. It is cremating, ending, sending up into ashes a way of life.

  It could be Amy. It feels like watching Amy. Sent into the next life. Or Ann. A little of both. Daughter and lover. Both kinds of love. All kinds of love.

  It is a funeral that could represent seven billion funerals. It is an important funeral, Trish Wong’s haphazard funeral. Maybe mankind’s most significant funeral ever. The funeral that leads mankind into its endgame, or its new start, its new history, depending.

  And Heller’s speech that he doesn’t give.

  Heller’s speech that he wants to, but that he contains, keeps to himself.

  I know you’re here. We all know you’re here. And make no mistake, I will find you. That is what I do. I don’t know whether you chose Trish because of me, to slow me down or derail or frighten me, if she was a targeted victim because of that, or if she was random, if her position assisting me was incidental, but I will find you, either way. I know you may be getting a special perverse joy out of being here right now, hiding in plain sight, “sharing” the grief, pretending to mourn but perhaps in fact snickering, perhaps even hoping to break me in some way, to have me abandon my mission. But knowing you’re here gives me a perverse pleasure similar to yours. Because I know, for a certainty, that I will catch you, and whatever international or provisional laws we choose or choose not to apply, I will personally be sure you pay. I see you. It’s one of you, and that’s good enough for me in this moment. Good enough to motivate me, to keep me going. Your only escape from me might be suicide, and I’ll accept that escape, if I have to, but I tell you now: That would probably be your best option. Die now, before I find you. Because who knows what form justice is going to take here now, in this new world we are entering together.

  He knows that they are looking at him. Some with pity perhaps, if they somehow know fully about Trish and him. Or regarding him with frustration that he hasn’t solved anything, that it’s happened again. He feels the stares at the back of his neck. Like he is in some way the next of kin. A proxy for the next of kin.

  He doesn’t care anymore. He lifts his head, turns around, faces the mourners.

  He starts going face-to-face. Hoping, yes, to see something, catch something, pick up on something, but that’s not really the point. The point is to say, I see you. I don’t know yet which one of you it is, but I will. I will.

  The light of the pyre pushes into the inky blackness; the flames lick the darkness. It’s the first outside illumination in weeks, carving a small piece of the landscape into a temporary, shimmery visibility. It is a few precious, temporary meters of warmth in the vast cold. They can stand close to it and feel the warmth, the two dozen of them who have ventured outside to attend this last part of the ceremony.

  It is freezing cold, literally freezing cold, just beyond the funeral pyre.

  A temporary light, a temporary warmth amid the vast cold and black.

  A metaphor for human existence, thinks Heller. For the current fragile state of humanity. A good proportion of it, possibly, actually standing right here.

  A temporary, merely evanescent heat and light, only made possible, he thinks grimly, by human sacrifice, by human flesh. Too high a sacrifice for heat and warmth? Isn’t that always what survival has required, sacrifice? But this is unnecessary sacrifice. Or are the shortcomings of the human species—the jealousies, the sins, the uncontrolled rage—just part of the deal, part of the package, from time immemorial?

  The thoughts are vague. He is more absorbed in watching the flames. Seeing the light flicker and dance on the faces of those close around it. In worship. In awe. In stunned, silent observation.

  The flames start to die down. The resulting cold rushes in. Heller can feel the temperature’s descent. They can feel the dangers of it on their skin, the sensitive thermal instrument, the warning system of their own epidermis. Time to get back inside. The remains of the pyre will stay out here, untouched, until they can clean it up in the warmth of spring.

  48.

  He can’t shake the association, the conflation, the spinning mental dance of the two events:

  An unpredictably virulent pathogen—a new kind of poison, uncharted, unanticipated, too quick and sinister to concoct a defense.

  And an unprecedented, still undetected poison that took Sandy Lazo-Wasum and Trish Wong. Quick and sinister as well.

  As if the death of Lazo-Wasum somehow augured the global poisoning, and Trish’s death somehow brings it back to Antarctica, closing a loop, tightening a noose.

  The rational part of him knows they have nothing to do with each other. One is a catastrophic event, if it is some kind of poison, far beyond the realm and control of science. The other is a personal, highly focused, highly directed effort, a carefully concocted, bespoke poison, with a narrow, specific goal, allowing its creator to murder undetected.

  Unless the concoction of the one has inadvertently, unpredictably unleashed the second. The first, say, sitting in Lazo-Wasum’s body, dormant, entombed, undisturbed, mercifully inert in the Antarctic cold, until it met with the warmth of a New Zealand or American autopsy lab, or interacted with some chemical agent in the lab.

  This is where Heller’s mind is going. From the specific to the general. Making a metaphor of poison. Poisoning the world, whether one specific and selected victim at a time or mankind all at once—is it the same impulse? The same evil, different only in scale?

  In the same vague, wandering frame of mind, Heller reconsiders the tiny pinprick at the base of the skull. Nothing notable or detectable found in the bloodstream in the Lazo-Wasum autopsy, and, yes, the Lazo-Wasum autopsy was botched, and, no, they weren’t equipped to do a full one on Trish, but there is nothing at all learned from either one—certainly nothing definitive about this pinprick.

  His mind vague, wandering, he begins to wonder: maybe that pinprick, that barely detectable pinprick, is there to tell a different tale.

  The recurring theme of Antarctica’s mix of the sophisticated and the primeval, of the ancient and the new comes back to him of how, in the absence of aut
opsy evidence, he has gone back to the old methods—interviews, instinct. Is that what’s going on with the crime itself? Old methods?

  What if the poison didn’t enter the bloodstream via that pinprick?

  How else would it enter?

  Via the most traditional path for poison, especially a whole class of hard-to-detect poisons.

  The way arsenic, roots, and other poisons have done their sinister work since the time of the Hebrews and the Greeks.

  Via food.

  Via the food supply.

  Not the general food supply, of course (there’s been no general event), but by a specific placement in a victim’s own food—nicely disguised by the fact that everyone, the whole base, was eating the same foods, and no one else got sick.

  And, of course, he thinks immediately of the supervisor in charge of food service.

  The same man who quite unobtrusively but quite suddenly emerged to take the lead in Trish Wong’s funeral, with his religious knowledge.

  Robert Manafort.

  Overseeing the food system closely.

  Always, because it’s so central, so important every day to the function of the base. It’s one source, after all: one cafeteria, one mess hall, no choices.

  And now, even more important, because the food supply is suddenly limited, potentially critical. It’s now an enormous responsibility.

  Robert Manafort. Heller opens his binder, breezes through the records toward him, stops at his page, rereads it.

  A veteran of wintering-over. An old hand. A bulwark of the secondary staff. Relied on. Not much thought about. A ready smile.

  Manafort. A religious zealot in hiding, here in a scientific community? Heller has thought of that, of course, listening to Manafort’s service. His easy, unthinking command of Bible verses. Is the zealot about to be unleashed, amid approaching, unpredictable end-of-the-world scenarios? Would zealotry in turn unleash followers? Heller has no idea.

  But he does know one thing:

  It’s time to take a kitchen tour.

  49.

  “Welcome, come on in. I’m surprised you haven’t taken the tour of our humble kitchen before,” says Manafort, acting expansive, but the gesture of welcome feels very careful—quite calculated—to Heller; all of Manafort’s movements seem a little robotic and orchestrated.

  He sits in Manafort’s tiny closet of an office, receivables receipts piled high around him in perfectly neat stacks. Corners squared up. There’s only one chair at Manafort’s small, makeshift desk. He’s shoved a second chair in temporarily for Heller to take, but, obviously, no one besides Manafort is ever in here.

  Heller would label the office obsessively neat. Somewhere beyond the expected and welcome order of a food services chief. One part of him is glad to see that level of obsessiveness at the top of polar food services. Another part of him wonders about it—that care, that thoroughness.

  Manafort smiles. “First of all, you should know, despite all the impressive advanced degrees and impressive, cutting-edge experiments and genius IQs around here, I feel like I’m the most important person at McMurdo,” he says. “What can I tell you? Everyone’s got to eat, and polar life all stops if we don’t.” It’s the words—the sentiment—of a rotund, jelly-jowled chef, but Manafort is rail lean, has big hands, looks more like a ranch hand.

  Heller nods. “Look, Robert.”

  He doesn’t say Call me Bob.

  “I want you to take me through the whole process of food prep. Receiving, storage, menu selection, nutritional decisions, preprep, preparation, postprep, leftovers, refrigeration, the whole deal.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to understand.”

  That’s for starters.

  “And as we go, I want you to tell me who does what. Introduce me to everybody else involved.”

  Manafort cocks his head, looks at him. Is preparing to walk him through it. He walks him over to the receiving palettes.

  Looks up. And says suddenly, unexpectedly, “Look, Mr. Heller, I feel we should talk.”

  Heller looks back at him.

  It’s no longer just a food-prep and food-processing discussion. It’s no longer just show-and-tell.

  “I know why you’re here.”

  Heller waits.

  “Because these are the last palettes. You know that and I know that. There are no more palettes coming. And we have to make a plan for that.”

  That’s not why Heller is here, of course, but he waits. Maybe the visit is becoming more important. Maybe the visit is going to reveal something about poison, or about even more than that, or different from that, heading down another path.

  Manafort gestures to the palettes. “These are basically half-full. I know you don’t know what a full palette looks like. I know how much food we have here. I know how much I can stretch it. I alone know, down to each meal. I’ve been doing this a long time. I know what I can do, how far I can get with what I have. And I know what the end of the line is.” He looks with challenge at Heller. “I can give you a countdown to the day,” he says. “If everyone here stays alive and maintains a certain calorie count, I can give you a countdown to the day. Do you want to know exactly what day it is?”

  Heller shakes his head no.

  “You don’t? Don’t you think you should? Our peace officer? Or the closest thing to it? I think it’s a little irresponsible of you not to know what we’re dealing with. I could just say it right now, blurt it out, and then you’d know.”

  “Don’t,” says Heller. “Please.”

  “You don’t want to be in a countdown mode, do you? You don’t want to know too much. You want to still get some sleep.” Manafort smiles creepily.

  Enjoying himself, Heller notices. Actually enjoying himself.

  “I could blurt it out.” A little game from Manafort. A little threat. Making a little game and threat out of basic humanity. Of living and dying. Of end-times. Making a little game for Heller.

  It all echoes with what a serial killer would do. A sweet spot, a joy for a serial killer.

  “How secure is the food supply?” Heller asks. As if ignoring everything he’s heard. Everything he’s intuiting already. “How secure from tampering?”

  Manafort blinks. “Tampering? What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I take it you don’t mean food poisoning. That’s unintentional. Has to do with shipping and refrigeration. I’m pretty careful about all that. We can’t afford any contamination. Especially now.”

  “No, I mean tampering. Intentional tampering.”

  Manafort shrugs, sighs. “Well, not secure at all.”

  An unguarded, undefensive answer, Heller notes. Not defensively crying “Impossible!” or even trying to hide the possibility. Appearing honest—intentionally? . . . calculatingly?—knowing, of course, that this opens as possible suspects virtually everyone at the station and hardly corners him.

  “I mean, so many people have access at so many points along the way . . .”

  “But it’s likeliest during food prep, no? And during food prep, there’s only a few of you, the same few of you, and you’d obviously notice anyone else, anyone unusual in the kitchen.”

  Food tampering.

  Food tampering for a single victim only. Fatal meal service for one. A single victim at a time.

  But it could be a specific victim.

  Or it could be a random victim.

  Serial killers come in both varieties. Specific victims. Random victims.

  If it was a specific victim and poisoning, it points more to Manafort or someone near him—someone near the end of the food-prep funnel.

  If it was random, it’s a wider circle of possibility. Someone dropping something into a random serving—even possibly after the dish was served.

  Something occurs to Heller suddenly. “Does anyone have a special diet?” Because that plate, a special-diet plate, is tailored specifically, after all, and can be specifically doctored.

  Maybe
Trish Wong. Maybe Sandy Lazo-Wasum.

  “Yes, some people do have a special diet,” says Manafort. “A handful.”

  Heller’s sensors pick up a little.

  “Including me,” says Manafort. A shrug. A quick little smile.

  So he’s the only one not at risk of being a random victim, if it is random victims, thinks Heller. The only one with his own eyes on his own food at all times.

  “Gluten-free. Dairy-free. Low sodium. Do you want me to list for you who gets what?”

  Trying to be cooperative—or pretending to be cooperative, thinks Heller.

  “No, thanks, that won’t be necessary,” Heller says.

  As Heller turns and leaves, Manafort says something behind him that he can’t quite make out. A whisper, an offhand comment.

  Heller whirls on him, brow furrowed. “What did you say?”

  Manafort shrugs, smiles a little. “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? You muttered something.”

  Manafort looks at him, confused. As if he hasn’t said anything. As if Heller is hearing things. Is confused. Manafort’s look is part sympathetic, part pity, part puzzlement, part concern.

  “Just going back to food prep, is all.”

  Heller doesn’t press it. He experiences it as a passing thought. Somewhere between a thought and an utterance. Maybe he is having a little T3. Maybe this is a warning to him of how it will affect him as the winter wears on.

  But Heller swears he heard it. A whisper, at the back of his brain.

  A little warning. A little statement. A truth that either Manafort uttered, insinuated under his breath, or that Heller’s own thinking has brought forward from somewhere in his unconscious, dreamlike in the form of an utterance in Manafort’s voice.

  But an indisputable and alarming little fact, T3 or not.

  A whisper, in Manafort’s voice:

  I’ve got the food.

  50.

  Fissures. Cracks.

  Not in the ice. The ice stays solid, frozen, unchanging.

  Not in the ice but in the little community assembled on top of it. In the interactions. In the eroding faith. Individual, collective.