The Best of Lucius Shepard (99 page)

“It’s
hard to believe,” she said. “But it’s the truth.” She let some seconds slip
past and then, when I remained mute, as if she were trying to keep the
conversation going, she went on: “I disagreed with Edman about a great many
things. He demanded that we allow the patients to find their own way. He
believed we should let their stories come out naturally. But I thought if we
prompted them some, if we reminded them of their original identities ... I
don’t mean give them every detail, you understand. Just their names and a
little background. That would have afforded them a stronger foundation and
perhaps we wouldn’t have had so many breakdowns among the slow-burners. These
people were re-inventing themselves out of whole cloth. They were bound to be
unstable. I was hoping Crain would agree with me, but...” She made a
contemptuous gesture, then seemed to remember where she was. “Do you want to
know anything else?”

I
still was at a loss for words, but I managed to say, “So I’m guessing
Pellerin’s a slow-burner.”

“Yes.
He was born Theodore Rankin. He’s forty-three. He believes he’s the world’s
best poker player. And he may well be.”

“What
was he before?”

“A
bartender. He was killed during a robbery. I don’t know how the corporation got
hold of the body.”

“The
corporation. I assume they took the project over after it went in the toilet at
Tulane.”

“That’s
right. But there was a gap of ten years or so.”

“Why’re
they so interested in a poker player?”

“It’s
not the poker playing per se that’s of interest, it’s the patients’ underlying
abilities. Their potentials go far beyond the life story they construct for
themselves. We don’t understand what they can do. None of them lived long
enough. But with the advances in microbiology made during the last two decades,
Doctor Crain thinks Josey may live for years. He’s developing more rapidly than
the others, too. That may be a result of improvements in the delivery system.
We used a heart pump at Tulane, but now they...”

“I
don’t have to know the gearhead stuff.” I mulled over what she had told me.
“You were fired from the original project. Why would Darden hire you? Where do
you fit in?”

Verret
toyed with the bottle cap. “I helped a patient escape. I couldn’t go along with
what they were doing to him anymore. He developed some astonishing abilities
while he was on the run. I’m the only person who’s dealt with someone that
advanced.”

“What
sort of abilities we talking about?”

“Perceptual,
for the most part. Changes in visual capacity and such.”

She
said this off-handedly, but I doubted she was being straight with me. I decided
not to push it, and I asked what they had been doing at Harrah’s.

“At
Tulane we kept the patients confined,” she said. “But Crain thought Josey would
develop more rapidly if we exposed him to an unstructured environment under
controlled conditions.” She gave a rueful laugh. “Turns out we didn’t have much
control.”

“How
much does Pellerin know?”

“He
knows he was brought back to life. But he doesn’t know about the new
personality ... though he suspects something’s wrong there. It’s up to me to
determine when he’s ready to hear the truth. Things go better if we tell them
than if we let them piece it together on their own.”

“I
still don’t understand your function. What exactly is it you do?”

“Patients
need to bond with someone in order to create a complex personality. They have
to be controlled, carefully manipulated. We were trained to instill that bond,
to draw out their capabilities.”

She
folded her arms, compressed her lips. I had the thought that, though none of
what she had told me was comedy club material, talking about her role in things
distressed her more than the rest.

“If
the other therapists are as good-looking as you,” I said, “I bet that
instilling thing goes pretty easily.”

That
seemed to distress her further.

“Come
on, cher,” I said. “You going to be just fine. Y’all can be a significant asset
for Billy, and that works to your advantage.”

She
leaned forward, putting a hand on my knee; the touch surprised me. “Mister
Lamb,” she said, and I said, without intending to, “Jack. You can call me
Jack.”

“I
want to be able to count on you, Jack. Can I count on you?”

“I
told you I don’t have any control over the situation.”

“But
can you be a friend? That’s all I’m asking. Can we count on you to be a
friend?”

Those
big brown eyes were doing a job on me, but I resisted them. “I haven’t ever
been much good as a friend. It’s a character flaw, I’m afraid.”

“I
don’t believe that.” She sat back, adjusting her T-shirt so it fit more snugly.
“You can call me Jo.”

* * * *

I
contacted Billy Pitch, though not during prime time, fearing I might interrupt
The
Surreal Life
or
Wife Swap
, and I told him what I had learned,
omitting any mention of the “remarkable powers” that might soon be Pellerin’s,
stressing instead his developing visual capacity. I wasn’t sure why I did
this—perhaps because I thought that Billy, already powerful, needed no further
inducement to use his strength intemperately. He professed amazement at what I
had to say, then slipped into business mode.

“I
got an idea, but it needs to simmer, so I’m going to stash you away for a
while,” he said. “Get everybody ready to travel tonight.”

“By
‘everybody,’” I said, “you don’t mean me, right? I got deals cooking. I have
to...”

“I’ll
handle them for you.”

“Billy,
some of what I got going requires the personal touch.”

“Are
you suggesting I can’t handle whatever piddly business it is you got?”

“No,
that’s not it. But there’s...”

“You’re
not going to thwart me in this, are you, Jack?”

“No,”
I said helplessly.

“Good!
Call my secretary and tell her what needs doing. I’ll see it gets done.”

That
night we were flown by private jet to an airstrip in South Florida, and then
transported by cigarette boat to Billy’s estate in the Keys. Absent from our
party was Dr. Crain. I never got to know the man. Each time I walked him to the
john or gave him food, he railed at me, saying that I didn’t know who I was
dealing with, I didn’t understand what was involved, causing such a ruckus that
I found it easier to keep him bound and gagged in a separate room. I warned him
that he was doing himself no good acting this way, yet all he did was tell me
again I didn’t know who I was dealing with and threaten me with corporate
reprisals. When it was time to leave, I started to untie him, but Huey dropped
a hand onto my shoulder and said, “Billy say to let him be.”

“He’s
a doctor,” I said. “He’s the only one knows what’s going on. What if Pellerin
gets sick or something?”

“Billy
say let him be.”

I
tried to call Billy, but was met with a series of rebuffs from men as
constricted by the literal limits of their orders as Huey. Their basic message
was, “Billy can’t be disturbed.” Crain’s eyes were wide, fixed on me; his
nostrils flared above the gag when he tried to speak. I made to remove it, but
Huey once again stayed my hand.

“Let
him talk,” I said. “He might...”

“What
he going to say, Jack?” Huey’s glum, wicked face gazed down at me. “You know
there ain’t nothing to say?”

He
steered me into the corridor, closed the door behind us and leaned against it.
“Get a move on,” he said. “Ain’t nothing you can do, so you might as well not
think about it.”

Yet
I did think about it as I descended the stair and walked along the corridor and
out into the drizzly New Orleans night. I thought about Crain waiting in that
stuffy little room, about whether or not he knew what was coming, and I thought
that if I didn’t change the way things were headed, I might soon be enduring a
similar wait myself.

* * * *

Some
weeks later, I watched a videotape that captured Jo’s interaction with one of
the short-lived zombies whose passage from death to life and back again she had
overseen at Tulane. By then, I had become thoroughly acquainted with Pellerin
and the zombie on the tape didn’t interest me nearly as much as Jo’s
performance. She tempted and teased his story out of him with the gestures and
movements of a sexier-than-average ballerina, exaggerated so as to make an
impression on the man’s dim vision, and I came to realize that all of her
movements possessed an element of this same controlled grace. Whether she was
doing this by design, I had no clue; by that time I had tumbled to the fact
that she was a woman who hid much from herself, and I doubted that she would be
able to shed light on the matter.

Over
the space of a month, Pellerin grew from a man whom I had mistaken for dead
money into a formidable presence. He was stronger, more vital in every way, and
he began to generate what I can only describe as a certain magnetism—I felt the
back of my neck prickle whenever he came near, though the effect diminished
over the days and weeks that followed. And then there were his eyes. On the
same day I interrogated Jo, I was escorting him to the john when he said, “Hey,
check this out, Small Time!” He snatched off his sunglasses and brought his
eyes close to mine. I was about to make a sarcastic remark, when I noticed a
green flickering in his irises.

“What
the fuck!” I said.

Pellerin
grinned. “Looks like a little ol’ storm back in there, doesn’t it?”

I
asked him what it was and he told me the flickers, etched in an electric green,
signaled the bacteria impinging on the optic nerve.

“They’re
bioluminescent,” he said. “Weird, huh? Jocundra says it’s going to get worse
before it gets better. People are going to think I’m the goddamn Green
Lantern.”

Though
he had changed considerably since that day, his attitudes toward almost
everyone around him remained consistently negative—he was blunt, condescending,
an arrogant smart-ass. Yet toward Jo, his basic stance did change. He grew less
submissive and often would challenge her authority. She adapted by becoming
more compliant, but I could see that she wasn’t happy, that his contentiousness
was getting to her. She still was able to control him by means of subtle and
not-so-subtle manipulation, but how long that control would last was a matter
for conjecture.

The
island where we were kept was Billy’s private preserve. It was shaped roughly
like a T, having two thin strips of land extending out in opposite directions
from the west end. Billy’s compound took up most of the available space. Within
a high white brick wall topped by razor wire were a pool, outbuildings
(including a gym and eight bungalows), a helicopter pad, and a sprawling
Florida-style ranch house that might have been designed by an architect with a
Lego fetish—wings diverged off the central structure and off each other at
angles such as a child might employ, and I guessed that from the air it must resemble
half a crossword puzzle. There were flat screen TVs in every room, even the
johns, and all the rooms were decorated in a fashion that I labeled
haute
mafia
. The dining room table was fashioned from a fourteenth century
monastery door lifted from some European ruin. The rugs were a motley
assortment of modern and antique. Some of the windows were stained glass
relics, while others were jalousies; but since heavy drapes were drawn across
them, whatever effect had been intended was lost. Every room was home to a
variety of antiquities: Egyptian statuary, Greek amphorae, Venetian glassware,
German tapestries, and so on. In my bathroom, the toilet was carved from a
single block of marble, and mounted on the wall facing it, a section of a
Persian bas-relief, was yet another flat screen. It was as if someone with the
sensibility of a magpie had looted the world’s museums in order to furnish the
place, and yet the decor was so uniformly haphazard, I had the impression that
Billy was making an anti-fashion statement, sneering at the concept of taste.
Elvis would have approved. In fact, had he seen the entirety of Billy’s house,
he would have returned home to Graceland and redecorated.