Aphrodite

by Russell Andrews

  “Gordon,” Wendell said, “I don’t drink Diet Cokes. I have never in my life had one of your Diet Cokes.”

  “I’m just saying, I had one in the fridge this morning and now it’s gone.”

  “Maybe you drank it and forgot.”

  Gordon shook his head. “I didn’t drink it.”

  Wendell looked at his watch. “Can we discuss this while we’re on the road?”

  Gordon was certain Wendell was lying—who the hell else would have been in their house, been in their refrigerator—but he sucked back his annoyance, nodded at his younger brother, opened the door to the driver’s side of the car, and stepped in. Wendell got in the passenger’s seat, reached into the glove compartment, and pulled out the automatic garage-door opener. He pointed and clicked and the door began to slide up and open.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Gordon said as he put the key in the ignition. “Look.”

  Wendell turned his head. On the floor of the driver’s side, by the gas pedal, was a hand grenade. Wendell had a collection he’d brought back years ago from the Gulf. Gordon reached down and picked it up, handed it to his brother.

  “For God’s sake,” Gordon said again, then snapped, “How the hell can you leave this thing in the car? Have you lost your mind?”

  “I didn’t leave that in the car,” Wendell said quietly.

  “Well, who else do we know who has toys like this?”

  “I’m not saying it’s not mine. It is. I have two of them left. I’m just saying I didn’t leave it here. And I didn’t drink your Diet Coke, either.” Then they both fell silent.

  The silence was broken when their cell phone rang. The twins looked at each other. As far as they knew, Alfred Newberg was the only one who had that particular number. And he’d made it clear that he would not be calling anymore.

  “Hello?” Gordon said tentatively into the receiver.

  “I got your number from Newberg,” a man’s voice said.

  “Who is this?”

  “Also your address.”

  “What the hell do you want?” Gordon asked.

  “I just want to tell you two things,” the voice went on.

  “Fuck off,” Gordon said. When the man didn’t say anything in response, Gordon put a little bit of sneer into his next words. He was getting angry. Whoever this guy was, he was going to suffer. “Okay, here’s your big break. What do you want to tell us, asshole?”

  “First, thanks for the Diet Coke.”

  Before the man could continue, Gordon and Wendell both heard the noise at the same time: a rolling noise, like a bowling ball slithering down a lane. The noise ended when whatever the object was came to a stop, bumping up against something. The rear right tire, it sounded like.

  “You want to know the second thing?” the voice asked. “’Cause I’d really like you to hear it.”

  Gordon swiveled around, saw a man standing outside their garage. The guy looked familiar. He looked like—

  “Shit,” Wendell said. And when Gordon turned to face him, the younger twin said, “The other grenade.”

  “Bye-bye,” the voice on the phone said. “That’s the second thing.” They both reached desperately for the door handles, Gordon to his left, Wendell to his right. Wendell got his fingers wrapped around the metal handle. Gordon didn’t even get that far.

  By the time the fire trucks arrived, Justin Westwood was over a mile away, driving back north, heading out of New Jersey on the two-and-a-half-hour drive toward East End Harbor.

  When he reached the sign on the side of the highway that welcomed him to Long Island, he realized he was whistling and had been whistling for quite some time.

  38

  FBI Assistant Director Leonard Rollins thought he was having a bad dream. In this dream, he was suffocating. He couldn’t breathe. It felt so real, as if something was stuffed down his throat, cutting off his air supply. At some point, the pain in his throat deepened, and that was when he realized he was awake. This was not a dream. He was in his queen-size bed in his room in the not-very-swank East End Motel, naked under one sheet. His eyes were open and above him he could see Justin Westwood. Westwood was holding a gun. The barrel of the gun was jammed into Rollins’s mouth. He could feel it pressing against the back of his throat and he could see Westwood’s finger on the trigger.

  “I’m here to give you a message,” Westwood said. “And I want you to tell your boss exactly the way you hear it from me.” Justin tossed that morning’s Times on the bed. It landed on Rollins’s chest. Justin eased his finger off the trigger, then slid the barrel of the gun out of Rollins’s mouth. He motioned so the agent knew it was okay to move, to sit up.

  Justin flicked on the bedside lamp and Rollins squinted at the sudden brightness. He waited a moment to focus his eyes, reached for the newspaper, and angled it so he could read the front-page story Justin wanted him to see. The story told about the discovery of the bodies of Douglas Kransten and Louise Marshall. The bodies were found in a room in their remote estate in the English countryside. One gun was found in the room. British police had ruled it a suicide pact. They determined that Kransten had shot his wife of over thirty years, turned the gun on himself, and pulled the trigger. Although there was no suicide note, the Justice Department had already issued a statement saying that Kransten and Marshall had been investigated for the past several months for illegal financial manipulations of their company, KranMar. The transgressions were of Enronlike proportions. Chase Welles, the head of the FDA, said that Kransten had been falsifying medical-research reports on many of KranMar’s products that had recently been released on an unsuspecting public. According to the Times, the company was about to declare bankruptcy and the couple faced, in addition to public disgrace, charges that ranged from fraud to murder.

  “I know all about this,” Rollins said. “Who the hell do you think formulated the Justice Department’s response?”

  “The threat’s over,” Westwood said. “Nobody has anything to worry about from Kransten or from the Aphrodite experiments. It’s over.”

  “I told them it was you. They didn’t believe me. They couldn’t figure out how you got out of the country.” Rollins gathered himself under the sheet, propped himself up farther, and stuck out his hand. “You did pretty good. I told them they shouldn’t underestimate you.”

  Justin ignored Rollins’s hand. Wouldn’t shake it. He waited until the agent slowly dropped it back by his side. “I did better than you think.”

  “And I’m sure you’re going to tell me about it.”

  “As a matter of fact, I am. Here’s the first thing you have to know— and here’s the first thing you have to tell your boss: Kransten had what you were so worried about. The formula was finished. He had the fountain of youth in his computer, along with marketing plans and a multi-million-dollar launch. The government’s worst nightmare come true. It exists.”

  “What’s the second thing?”

  “I’ve got it. The complete formula. All the details of the years of experimentation. It’s enough to re-create it perfectly.”

  “Then just turn it over,” Rollins said, “and the whole thing’ll be forgotten.”

  “Not a chance,” Westwood told him.

  “You don’t want to be in that position, Justin. As long as you have it, they’re going to come after you.”

  “As long as I’m the only one who has it.”

  “Oh, Christ. What are you telling me?”

  “It’s been distributed. To quite a few people. Everyone I trust has a copy.”

  “You fucking idiot. You don’t know what you’ve done.”

  “I know exactly what I’ve done,” Justin said quietly. “I’ve made sure you bunch of lying psychopaths leave me, Deena Harper, and her daughter, Kendall, alone.”

  “You’ve done just the opposite. You just signed your own death warrants.”

  “I don’t think so. You pass all this along: The people I’ve sent copies to …no one knows what he’s got. They don’t kn
ow its purpose. Everyone knows one thing only: Over the next ten years, starting today, if anything happens to me, Deena, or her little girl, they’re all to make the notes and the formula public. They’ve got instructions on exactly how to do it. And you’ll never be able to stop all of them.”

  “Why ten years?”

  “Less than that, you people hold grudges. You’d kill us out of spite as soon as you thought it was safe. More than that didn’t seem realistic. After a decade, I’ll take my chances. I figure by then you’ll be old and I’ll be able to take you in a fair fight if you decide to come after me.”

  Rollins sank back in the bed. “How many people have copies?”

  “Too many for you to go after. And in case you decide to, they’ve all got the names of three other people who have the disks. Anything suspicious happens to any of them, someone’s going to release the formula and spread the word.”

  Rollins stayed quiet for the longest minute of his life. Finally, he said, “And all we have to do is leave you alone?”

  “No. I want news coverage clearing us. Me, Deena, Frank Manwaring. I want a plausible explanation for Maura Greer’s death made very public. I want Wanda Chinkle to get credit for solving the case so you can’t fire her. You can link it to Kransten or Newberg or whoever you want. But we’re absolutely cleared of any suspicion in any of it. Same for the murders of Ed Marion and Brian Meves. Solve those cases and make sure we’re cleared. Wanda can get credit for everything, if that makes it easier for you. But I want to read about all of it in the New York Times and see it on every television news show in the country within forty-eight hours.”

  “I don’t know if that’s possible,” Rollins said.

  “I do. You want me to run down the list of murders the govern-ment’s been involved in that have never come to light? How about just a list of supposed suicides?”

  “I have to check with my superiors.”

  “Fine. While you’re at it, check and see how they’ll like it if CNN gets proof of the conspiracy that’s been going on for fifteen years with the pharmaceutical companies.”

  “All right. Let’s assume you’ve got a deal.”

  “I want to make it even clearer. I want to make absolutely certain you understand the way things stand, you little shithead. If anything happens to me, Deena, or Kendall over the next ten years—and I mean anything—you’re fucked. If any of us get hit by a car crossing the street or choke on a chicken bone in a restaurant or get cancer, the Aphrodite formula is made public and the conspiracy’s revealed. So you might not just want to leave us alone, you guys might want to hire crossing guards for us and make sure we’ve got really good medical insurance. You got it?”

  “I’ve got it. Anything else?”

  “Yeah. Get out of East End Harbor. After tomorrow, if I see you within two blocks of where I am, anywhere in the world, I’m going to kill you without even asking a question. You got that, too?”

  “I’ve got that, too. You have anything else?”

  “No.”

  “Then I have a question for you.”

  “Okay. You can have one.”

  “We heard there was a daughter. Kransten had a daughter.”

  “I heard that too. Apparently she died a long time ago. As a child.”

  “So you didn’t see anyone? There was no trace of a daughter living there?”

  “Absolutely no trace,” Justin said. And then he said, slowly, almost incredulously, “You people. You fucking careless people. You think you can do what you want, hide the things you don’t want people to see. Why’d you go along with it? What makes you so sure you’re right about things that you’ll let so many people die?”

  “I work for the government,” Rollins said. “I work for people who see the big picture.”

  “There’s always a big picture with you guys, isn’t there? There’s always something that justifies all the damage you do.”

  Their eyes met and locked. “Congratulations,” Rollins said. “You won.”

  Justin shook his head. “Everybody lost,” he said. Then he turned and walked out of the motel room without ever looking back.

  39

  They had dinner at Sunset. Sat outside and watched the moon’s reflection glide over the water of East End Bay. They had oysters and then grilled fish, with a chilled bottle of good white wine. Neither one of them wanted coffee or dessert, but they had an after-dinner drink, thin cordial glasses of a vin santo.

  Justin walked Deena home after dinner. They strolled along Main Street, which was busy with the midsummer tourist crowd desperate to pack in as many evenings of carefree fun before Labor Day. They reached the front of her house, went inside, up the stairs into her apartment. They paid the baby-sitter, looked in on Kendall, who was asleep, then they went into Deena’s room and they made love. There was no conversation; he just reached for her and she responded. It started simply enough, with a kiss, but then her nails ran down his back and she bit his lip until he yelped in pain. He grabbed her hair and kissed her hard. They undressed each other, yanking their clothes off in jerky, spasmodic movements, and fell on the bed. They made love for a long time, and they both knew there was something desperate, almost violent in the way they were kissing and touching and writhing and moaning. When they were done, they were both sweating and breathing hard, both of them stunned at the emotion and the release they had just experienced.

  It took Justin a long time before he could speak but finally, his chest still heaving, he said, “So what happens now?”

  Deena wiped the sweat off her forehead. She got up from the bed, grabbed a blue silk robe off the hook on the back of her bedroom door. She wrapped the robe around her, sat back on the bed, one leg tucked under her. She reached over and put her hand on his arm. “My whole life, the last few years of it anyway, has been spent trying to achieve some kind of spiritual balance. That’s what I believe in, Jay. Balance and peace. Your life—”

  “I know. Not too spiritual or balanced. And not too peaceful.”

  “It all just scares me so much. And it’s not just me. Okay, I know it all exists, all the ugliness you choose to see. But I don’t want to have to face it. I’m sure you think that’s hypocritical or cowardly, but I don’t want to face it. And Kendall, maybe she can get through the rest of her life without having to see some of these things. Maybe her life can be different.”

  “But not if I’m around it can’t.”

  “No.”

  He nodded, turned, and started to move away. She reached out for him, hooked his arm with her hand, pulled him back closer to her.

  “I know what you think. You think it’s what happened with Newberg. The violence. But it’s not just that. It’s more than that. It’s all of it.”

  “It’s what my wife used to say. Alicia. She used to have that same look in her eyes that you have.”

  “What look?”

  “I used to point it out to her and she’d say I was crazy. She said the only look she had was one of love.”

  “And what did you say it was?”

  “Oh, it was love. But it was something else, too. It was fear.”

  “I’m not afraid of you, Jay.”

  “No. Neither was she. It’s a different kind of fear. It’s a fear of life. Of my life. Of what I’d bring into our life.” He smiled at her, leaned over, and kissed her lightly on the lips. “You want to tell me that the only look in your eyes is one of love.”

  “No,” Deena said sadly. “I can’t do that. But there is love there, too.”

  “So what do we do?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” she told him. “Maybe we just go on and see what happens. See which is stronger, the love or the fear.”

  He thought about that for a while, then he nodded, smiled a brief flicker of a smile. They made love again, this time slowly and gently, and she fell asleep in his arms.

  At two o’clock in the morning, he untangled himself, slipped out of her bed, and got dressed. He leaned down, kissed her lightly on
the cheek. She stirred in her sleep and gave a satisfied sigh. He turned, left her bedroom and then her apartment, headed down the silent, deserted street, back to his small Victorian house half a mile away.

  When he opened the door, stepped into his living room, and felt the solitude envelop him, Justin Westwood waited for the familiar roar of music to take over as it had done so often over the years. He expected something sad or harsh or cynical to fill him up. But no music came just now. He was restless, he realized, thought about having a couple of scotches, but that didn’t seem right somehow. He stood in the darkness of the living room, not bothering to turn on the lights, and he closed his eyes for a moment, remembering how easy it was for him, not so very long ago, to disappear within his own head and shut the world out.

  But after a few seconds, his eyes opened. The world was quite visible, if cast in late-night shadows.

  Justin turned on the light. He walked to his built-in bookshelf. He removed three books from the middle of the shelf, reached behind them. His hand came out holding a floppy disk for a computer. The disk was protected in a thin paper sleeve. Justin stared at the disk in his hand for quite a while, then he went to his laptop and inserted the disk into the A drive. Justin studied the formula on his screen, read the notes and history well into the night. It was dawn when he was done and he clicked on Close. A box came up on the screen asking him if he wanted to save the document. He clicked on No, and watched as the words disappeared.

  Justin removed the disk, put it back in the thin paper covering, walked over to a wastebasket at the other side of the room. He held the disk over the basket, picked up a book of matches lying next to a candle on his windowsill. Justin lit a match, held it up to the disk, and set it on fire. He held it between his thumb and forefinger until he couldn’t hold it anymore, then he let it drop into the wastebasket. He watched as the disk began to melt and curl and disappear.

  Justin realized that he had an early and busy day tomorrow. He’d be back at the East End Harbor police station and there was a lot of work to do. He was suddenly overcome with exhaustion; he knew he should try to get a couple of hours’ sleep.