The Conspiracy Club (6 page)

“Back to the bad seed,” said Jeremy.

“Another theologically loaded concept. And, as you said, discouraging. But are the data inconsistent with that notion?”

“The data are too muddy to prove anything, Arthur. They merely suggest.”

“I see,” said Arthur. “So you find it inconceivable that the totality of violence — or even the majority — is passed along in the nucleic acid.”

“Sins of the fathers,” said Jeremy. “Your jungle beetle injecting his parasitical spawn.”

Nothing’s accidental with you, is it, Dr. Chess?

Arthur chuckled and crossed to the door. “Well, this has been illuminating. Thank you for your patience, and anytime I can reciprocate, please feel free.”

He left, and Jeremy remained standing. Wondering if the old man’s parting words were simple courtesy, or did he really expect Jeremy to drop in with a question.

What would he ever want from a pathologist?

His mind camera-shuttered to Jocelyn’s face. What lay below her face. Wounds he’d never seen but had imagined. A rending of flesh that haunted him with its terrible ambiguity.

Now, Tyrene Mazursky.

There was nothing in common between a middle-aged hooker and sweet Jocelyn
but
the wounds.

Enough in common to put Doresh back on his trail.

His heart hammered as he punished himself with imagined horror. Arthur would be at home with all that, would reduce it to cell biology and organ weight and chemical compounds.

Arthur would deal with the stuff of screaming nightmares the way he waxed eloquent about carcinomas and sarcomas every Tuesday morning: avuncular manner, easy smile — perpetual coolness — what was
his
resting pulse?

The questions he wanted to ask the old man stuck in his craw.

Are we talking about this because you know what I’ve been through? Is this just morbid curiosity, or do you have a point?

Why hadn’t he spoken up?

What do you want from me?

W
hen his heart slowed, Jeremy went on the wards and comforted his patients. He must have functioned adequately because eyes brightened, a few smiles broke, hands clutched his fingers, and one teenage girl flirted with him, harmlessly. When he was alone, charting, the imprint — the feel — of every single patient remained with him. As if he carried them around, a mama kangaroo.

The flesh of the afflicted felt no different than anyone else’s. Not until the terminal stages. Dying patients reacted in different ways. Some were gripped with last-minute bravura, became garrulous, told inappropriate jokes. Some reminisced endlessly or offered noble blessings to the acolytes who ringed their beds. Others simply faded. But they had something in common — something Jeremy had yet to identify. A person working the wards long enough could tell when death was imminent.

Jeremy had never felt anything but a terrible fatigue when a patient left him.

He tried to imagine someone getting a thrill out of another’s death. Simply considering that possibility made his shoulders sag.

Taking a break in the doctors’ dining room for coffee, he spotted Angela Rios eating yogurt by herself, walked up to her, made small talk, and asked her to dinner that night.

Amazed at the calm voice that issued from his mouth. Feeling a smile curl around his lips, as if his mouth was being manipulated by a ventriloquist, as he made his
play
.

No good reason to ask her, other than her beauty, intelligence, charm, and the fact that she was obviously interested.

She said, “I’m sorry, I’m on call.”

“Too bad,” said Jeremy. Could he have misread her that badly?

As he turned to leave, she said, “I’m off tomorrow. If that’s convenient for you.”

“Let me check my calendar.” Jeremy pantomimed page-flipping. The old self-deprecating wit. Angela laughed easily.

Lovely girl. If I was interested . . .

“Tomorrow, then,” he said. “Meet you here?”

“If you don’t mind,” said Angela, “I could use some time to go home and freshen up. I’m off at seven, how about eightish?” She pulled out her resident’s spiral notebook, scrawled, ripped out the page, and handed it to Jeremy.

West Broadhurst Drive, in Mercy Heights.

Probably one of the old clapboard colonials converted to flats. Jeremy’s sad little bungalow was in the Lady Jane district, a short walk from Mercy Heights Boulevard.

“We’re neighbors.” He told her his address.

“Oh,” she said. “I’m not home much, the schedule, you know.” Her beeper went off. She smiled apologetically.

Jeremy said, “As if on cue.”

“As if.” She hung her stethoscope around her neck, gathered her resident’s manual and her notebook, and stood.

“See you tomorrow,” she said.

“Eightish.”

“I’ll be ready.”

Her apartment was on the second floor of a gloomy-looking, three-story structure that shouted boardinghouse. Medicinal smells bittered the creaky hallway — perhaps other interns and residents lived here and brought samples home — the carpeting was tamped down, brown, and stale, and two bicycles were chained to the oft-painted railing.

Angela came to the door within seconds of Jeremy’s ring. She’d tied back all that glorious, dark hair and fashioned a tight braid that trailed down her back. A soft white sweater caused Jeremy to notice her breasts. The sweater ended just above her waist and was bottomed by black, cinch-waist slacks and black high-heeled sandals. She wore pearl earrings and a tiny ruby on a filament-thin gold chain. Unobtrusive makeup.

The tight hair accentuated the olive oval of her face. Her brown eyes were alive with interest, her lips parted in a smile. She smelled great.

“Ready, as promised!” She shot out her hand and gave his a firm, hard shake.

Almost a military maneuver, and Jeremy suppressed a smile.

Perhaps she sensed his amusement, because she blushed. Eyed his topcoat. “Is it really cold?”

“Nippy.”

“I’m a sunshine baby, always cold. Let me grab a wrap, and we’re off.”

He took her to a midpriced, family-run Italian place on the better side of Lady Jane. The gentrified side: storefronts converted to softly lit pubs and bookstores and florists and five-table restaurants. Vestiges of the old days were represented by the painted-over windows of vacuum cleaner repair shops, immigrant tailors, Chinese laundries, cut-rate pharmacies. The rain — the clammy, acid spatter that had hectored the city for four days running — had ceased and the air was sweet and the streetlights beamed as if in gratitude.

Jeremy rushed to open Angela’s door — old habits; the academy had pounded etiquette into him. When she got out of the car, she took his arm.

The feel — the faint clawing — of feminine fingers on his sleeve . . .

The hostess was the chef’s wife. She had bosoms you could rest a dictionary on and a commodious smile. She seated them in a rear booth, brought breadsticks and menus and a small dish of garlic-scented olives. Perfect dating fare.

This was, indeed, a date.

What then, genius?

Angela ordered casually, as if food wasn’t the issue.

They talked easily.

For some reason — perhaps it was her eagerness, or the simplicity with which she conducted herself — Jeremy had guessed Angela to be a high achiever of working-class origins, possibly the first of her family to go to college.

He was wrong on all accounts. She’d grown up sunny and comfortable on the West Coast, and both of her parents were physicians — rheumatologist father, dermatologist mother, each a clinical professor at a first-rate med school. Her only sibling, a younger brother, was studying for a Ph.D. in particle physics.

“Scholarly bunch,” he said.

“It wasn’t really like that,” she said. “No pressure, I mean. Actually I never wanted to be a doctor. My freshman major was dance.”

“You’ve covered a bit of territory.”

“A bit.” Her face grew old for half a moment. As if to cover, she ate a garlic-olive. “What about you? Where are you from?”

Jeremy weighed his options. There was the short answer: the last city he’d lived in, the school from which he’d graduated, the artful digression to work-talk.

The long answer was: an only child, he’d been five years old when Mom and Dad were killed in a twenty-car, New Year’s Eve auto pileup on a sleet-slicked turnpike. At the moment of fatal impact, he’d been sleeping at his maternal grandmother’s house, dreaming of the board game Candy Land. He knew that because someone had told him, and he’d preserved it like a specimen. But the rest of the preorphan years were a greasy blur. Nana had failed soon after and been sent to a home, and he was raised by his father’s mother, a bitterly altruistic woman who never recovered from the crushing responsibility. After her fade to senility, the boy, then eight, was taken in by a series of distant relatives, followed by a sequence of foster homes, none abusive or attentive. Then, the Basalt Preparatory Academy agreed to accept him as a charity case because members of its new board decided something
Socially Conscious Finally Needed to Be Done.

His formative years — the period psychoanalysts so absurdly term “latency” — were filled with bunk beds, drills, a full menu of humiliation, uncertainty for dessert. Jeremy turned inward, bested the rich kids at the academic game despite the tutors that flocked to them like remora. He graduated third in his class, turned down the chance to go to West Point, entered college, took five years to earn his baccalaureate because of having to work minimum-wage night jobs. Another year tending bar and delivering groceries and tutoring dull, rich children helped him save up some money, after which he attended graduate school on full fellowship.

Earning his Ph.D. hadn’t been tough. He’d written his dissertation in three weeks. Back then, writing had come easily.

Then: starving intern, postdoc fellow, the position at City Central. Seven years on the wards. Jocelyn.

What he said was: “I grew up in the Midwest — ah, here comes the food.”

During dinner, one of them, Jeremy wasn’t sure who, steered the conversation to hospital politics, and he and Angela talked shop. When they returned to the car, she took his arm. Back at her door, she looked into his eyes, rose on tiptoes, kissed his cheek hard, and retracted her head. “I had a great time.”

Drawing the boundary: this far, no farther.

Fine with him, he had no stomach for passion.

“I did, too,” he said. “Have a good night.”

Angela flashed perfect, white teeth. Clacked her purse open, found her key, and gave a tiny wave and was on the other side of the door before either of them was pressed to say more.

Jeremy stood in the grubby hallway and waited until her footsteps faded before turning heel.

O
ver the next three weeks, Angela and Jeremy went out four times. Scheduling was a challenge: twice, Angela had to cancel because of patient emergencies and a surprise request by the chief of medicine for Jeremy to deliver a grand rounds on procedural anxiety caused him to offer apologies — he needed the evening to prepare.

“No problem,” she said, and when Jeremy delivered his talk, she was sitting in the fifth row of the hospital auditorium. Afterward, she winked at him and squeezed his hand and hurried off to join the other residents on morning rounds.

The next night, they had their fifth date.

Basic, unimaginative stuff, their time together. No couples-bungee-jumping, no edgy concerts or performance art exhibits, no long rides out of the city, past the harbor and the western suburbs to the flat plains, where the moon was huge and you could find a quiet place to park and consider infinity. Jeremy knew the plains well. He’d spent most of his life in the Midwest, but sometimes it still shocked him.

Long ago — before Jocelyn, when he’d been simply lonely — he’d driven out to the plains often, speeding alone on a soporific highway, wondering how many flat miles you’d have to travel before the earth shrugged itself a hillock.

Their relationship grew in mundane soil: a quintet of quiet dinners at five separate, quiet, serviceable restaurants: two Italian, one Spanish, a quasi-French place that termed itself “Continental.” After Angela let loose her affection for Hunan cuisine, Jeremy found a blue-lit Chinese café that had gotten good reviews in the
Clarion
. More money than he was used to spending, but the smile on her face made it worth it.

Decent food, earnest conversation, a brushing of fingertips now and then, very little in the way of flirtation or sexual suggestion.

So different from the way it had been with Jocelyn. Jeremy knew comparisons were destructive, but he didn’t care. Comparison was what came naturally, and he wasn’t even sure he wanted a clear shot at something new.

Jocelyn had been sex and perfume, the perfume of sex. The serpentine duet of tongues, moist panties on their first date, hips lifted, a musky delta the gift proffered.

His first date with Jocelyn had ended before dessert. The frantic drive to her place, ripping each other’s clothes off. Someone so petite, but so strong. Her small, hard body had slammed against Jeremy’s with a force that thrilled him and left his bones bruised.

Jocelyn had always left him breathless.

Angela was polite.

On the second date, she said, “I hope this doesn’t sound rude, but can I ask how old you are?”

“Thirty-two.”

“You look a lot younger.”

Not flattery, the truth, and offered as such.

Jeremy had looked twelve at sixteen, didn’t need to shave until he entered college. He’d hated the reticence of his hormones, all those girls he desired regarding him a kid.

By his thirties, he’d ended up with one of those smooth, angular faces that resists aging. His hair was fine and straight, an unremarkable light brown, and no bald spots or gray strands had intruded. He wore it parted on the right, and unless he used some kind of hair product, it flopped over his forehead. He believed his complexion to be sallow, but women had told him he had great skin. One, a poet, had taken to calling him “Byron,” and insisted that his unremarkable brown eyes were well beyond intense.