The Conspiracy Club (7 page)

He was medium-sized, medium weight, not muscular, wore 10D shoes and a 40 regular suit.

To his mind, about as average as you could be.

Angela said, “I mean it. You look really young. I figured you had to be about that because you told me you’ve been on staff at Central seven years. But you could easily pass for my age, or even younger.”

“Which is?”

“Guess.”

“Two years post M.D. means twenty-eight.”

“Twenty-seven. I skipped third grade.”

Same age as Jocelyn. He said, “I’m not surprised.”

Angela said, “I was just a precocious brat,” and began talking about the rigors of residency.

Jeremy listened. You never knew when professional training would come in handy.

The good-bye pattern begun on the first date continued: walking Angela to her door, the silence, the smile, the outstretched hand.

Then: a hard, defensive peck on the cheek and her claim, a bit too emphatic, of having had a wonderful time.

Jeremy began wondering what she wanted.

After the fifth date, both of them filled with Chinese food, she invited him into her compulsively neat but shabbily turned-out apartment, showed him to a secondhand sofa that still smelled of disinfectant, poured wine for both of them, excused herself, and slipped into the bathroom.

Jeremy looked around. Angela had a good eye. Each component was cheap, scarred, and conspicuously temporary. A sorry houseplant struggled for life on a chipped windowsill. Yet the composite was pleasing.

Still, he wondered: two physician parents. Surely, she could have afforded better.

She emerged from the bathroom wearing a long, green robe — silk or something like it — sat next to him, drank wine, sidled closer, dimmed the lights. They began kissing deeply. Moments later, her robe fell open, and Jeremy was inside her.

Being there brought him no tremor of triumph. On the contrary, he felt a cold wave of letdown course through him: She wasn’t moving much, didn’t seem
there
. He pumped away, hard, steady, detached, thinking irreverent thoughts.

Maybe it’s the Chinese food.

Maybe after five dates she feels obligated . . .

Jocelyn had been . . .

Opening his eyes, he looked down at her face. What he could make out in the ashy darkness was serene. Lying back, accepting him passively, as he thrust himself into her. Her eyes were clamped shut. Would they flutter open, sense his
objectivity
?

He decided,
To hell with it, pleasure myself, and forgot about her
. The next time he looked down her face had changed. As if an internal switch had been flicked. Or she’d decided to come alive. Was she just one of those women who needed time — who the hell ever really knew about women? Now, she flipped her head to the side, grimaced, began grinding back at him. Gripped him with heels and hands and bit his ear and quickened her breathing to a hoarse pant as she tightened her pelvic vise and held him fast.

Jeremy’s objective, disinterested hard-on became something else completely as she cupped his balls and kissed him and cried out.

A shout — a bellow of pleasure — escaped from his mouth, and he collapsed, they both did, lying on the stinking couch, entwined.

Later, when thoughts of Jocelyn crept into his head, he shooed them away.

He drove home tingling below the waist. It was only later, hours later, lying fetally in his own bed, alone, aware of every detail in the room, that he allowed the twinges of guilt to temper his pleasure.

T
he day after making love to Angela, Jeremy paged her and drew her away from the wards and took her to his office. After locking the door, he reached under her skirt and placed her hand upon him. She whimpered, and said, “Really?” He rolled down her panty hose and her panties in one smooth swoop, and they connected standing against the door, intermittently aware of passing footsteps out in the corridor.

As she clung to him, she said, “This is terrible.”

“Should I stop?”

“Stop and I’ll kill you.”

They finished on the cold, linoleum floor. Angela dusted off her white coat and straightened herself, fluffed her hair and kissed him, and said, “I’ve got patients.” Her face grew sad. “Guess what, I’m on call for the next twenty-four.”

“Poor thing,” said Jeremy, stroking her hair.

“Will you miss me?”

“Sure.”

She placed her hand on her skirt, directly above the soft spot where he’d just filled her. “Will you do this to me again when I’m off call?”

“
To
you?”

She grinned. “Men do it to women, that’s what it is.”

Jeremy said, “Again, as in here?”

“Here, anywhere. God, I needed that.”

“Put that way,” said Jeremy, twining her hair around his fingers, “you leave me no choice. Easing the schedule and all that.”

She laughed, touched his face. Was off.

Alone, Jeremy tried to work on his sensory deprivation book chapter but got little done. He went over to the doctors’ dining room for coffee. White coats got it for free, one of the few perks left, and he took advantage of it often. He knew he was swallowing way too much caffeine, but why not? What was there to be slow about?

The room was sparsely occupied, just a few attendings taking time off between patients.

And one whose patients didn’t talk back. Arthur Chess sat alone, at a corner table, with a cup of tea and an unfurled newspaper.

Jeremy’s pathway to the coffee urn took him right into Arthur’s sights, but the pathologist gave no sign of recognition. Ignoring Jeremy — if he saw Jeremy at all.

Jeremy found a table at the opposite end of the dining room, where he drank and found himself studying Arthur.

Now he saw why Arthur hadn’t noticed him. The old man was busy observing.

The object of his fascination was a group of three physicians hunched over pie and coffee, two tables over. A trio of men, engaged in what looked to be spirited academic discussion.

Jeremy recognized one of them, a cardiologist named Mandel. A good man, if a bit distracted. He’d thrown a few consults Jeremy’s way, some ill-conceived, all well-intentioned. His back was to Jeremy, and he hunched forward, paying close attention.

The other two men wore surgical greens. One was tan, maybe Latino, with dark, well-groomed hair and a barbered black mustache. The other was white. Literally. His long, drawn face bore an indoor pallor Jeremy had only seen in long-term patients. Clipped yellowish hair topped a domed cranium. His nose was a beak, and his cheeks were sunken.

He was doing all the talking, moving his lips and gesturing with spidery hands that served a surgeon well. Mandel remained rapt. The dark-mustached man’s attention seemed to flag, as if he was put-upon, being there.

The pale man pulled a pen out of his pocket, drew something on a napkin, and gesticulated some more with those long-fingered hands. Mandel nodded. The pale man made a sawing motion and smiled. Mandel said something, and the yellow-haired surgeon sketched some more. Words were exchanged all around. Arthur kept staring.

Obviously some sort of technical demonstration. Why would Arthur, a delver into death, a wielder of bone saws and carpentry tools, find it fascinating? The old curiosity kicking in?

That was probably it. Arthur was mentally voracious, a true intellectual. Jeremy, who read magazines in his spare time and rarely opened the classic psychology texts he collected, felt shallow by comparison.

He wondered why the pathologist didn’t get up and join the group. An intrusion to be sure, but Arthur was an important man at Central, and his stature would have guaranteed a welcome.

Then Arthur’s interest seemed to wane and he turned a page of his newspaper, and Jeremy wondered if he’d been wrong. Perhaps Arthur wasn’t noticing the three men any more than he’d noticed Jeremy. Maybe the old man was caught up in some internal rapture — butterflies, predatory beetles, the minutae of body fluids, whatever — and the cant of his big, bald head toward the discussion had been a coincidence of angulation.

Now, the old man’s eyes were glued to the paper. All the better. Jeremy could drink his coffee in peace, return to his office unmolested, put his feet up on his desk, and recall the wonders of making love to Angela.

He allowed himself to wonder what the next time would be like.

Men do it to women.

The pale man stopped waving his pen. Seemed to draw himself away from his demonstration. Stared across the room at Jeremy.

Intense stare.

Or perhaps, Jeremy had imagined it because now the man was back to his lecture.

Arthur stood, folded his paper, fixed the tilt of his bow tie. Headed straight for Jeremy’s table. Big smile on the pink face. “How fortuitous,” he said. “I was just about to call you.”

H
e took a seat at Jeremy’s table, unbuttoned his white coat, stuffed the paper in his pocket. His shirt was snowy-white piqué, heavily starched, with a high, stiff collar. The bow tie of the day was mint green, a luxuriant silk specked with tiny gold
fleur-de-lis
.

“I wondered,” he said, “and please don’t think me forward — I wondered if you’d care to join me for supper this Friday evening. There are some people, interesting people, whom I’d like you to meet. Who, I’m allowing myself to presume, you might enjoy meeting.”

“Friends of yours?”

“A group . . . so to speak.” The old man’s speech, usually fluid, had grown choppy. Arthur Chess, embarrassed?

Perhaps to cover, he smiled. “We meet from time to time to discuss matters of mutual interest.”

“Medical matters?” said Jeremy. Then he remembered Arthur’s persistent curiosity about “very bad behavior.” Had all that been a prelude to this?

“A wide range of issues,” said Arthur. “We aim for erudition, but nothing ponderous, Jeremy. The company’s amiable, the food is well prepared — quite tasty, really — and we pour some fine spirits. We sup late. Though I don’t imagine that will be a problem for you.”

How could Arthur know of his insomnia? “Why’s that?”

“You’re an energetic young man.” One of the pathologist’s big hands slapped the table. “So. Are we set?”

Jeremy said, “Sorry, Friday’s tough.” He didn’t have to lie. Angela’s on-call ended Thursday night. No date had been set for Friday, but there was no reason for her to turn him down.

“I see. Well, another time, then.” Arthur got to his feet. “No harm trying. I didn’t mean to put you on the spot. If you change your mind, feel free to let me know.” He placed a palm on Jeremy’s shoulder. Weighty; Jeremy became aware of the pathologist’s bulk and strength.

“Will do. Thanks for thinking of me, Arthur.”

“I thought
precisely
of you.” Arthur’s hand remained on Jeremy’s shoulder. Jeremy whiffed bay rum and strong tea and something acrid, possibly formaldehyde.

“I’m flattered,” said Jeremy.

Arthur said, “Do consider this: During times of abject disorder, a good, late-night supper can be most fortifying.”

“Disorder?” said Jeremy.

But the old man had already turned and left.

Back in his office, he failed to conjure anything to do with Angela, past or future.

The word caromed around his head:
Disorder
.

Not mine; the city’s. The world’s.

Mine.

The old bastard was right. What better description of a time when women were stalked and hunted and brought down like prey simply because they were women. Where men with low resting heart rates chose their victims with all the gravitas of grocery shoppers squeezing melons.

Men who craved blood gas and terror-struck eyes, the confiscation of body juice, the ultimate power.

Monster-men who
needed
all that to get their
own
blood rushing.

Disorder
was the perfect description of a world where Jocelyn’s death enlisted her in the same sorority as Tyrene Mazursky.

He hadn’t been able to conjure Angela, but now Jocelyn’s face flew into his head. Her laughter, even at his lamest jokes, the way she cared for her hopeless patients. Her pixie face when it flushed and compressed in the throes of pleasure.

When it had been really good for her, the flush that rose from her pelvis to her chin.

Then, another kind of face. Also compressed. No pleasure.

Nausea coiled around Jeremy’s gut. He felt the urge to vomit, grabbed his wastebasket, and plunged his face into it. All that came were dry heaves. He sat low, dangling the basket, his head between his hands, sweating, panting.

Monster-men, creating human dross. Then other men — coarse civil servants like Hoker and Doresh — fashioned careers from the waste.

He managed to expunge a plug of mucus from his throat and throp it into the trash. Removing the plastic bag from the basket, he took it to the men’s room, tossed it, returned to his office, locked the door, and thumbed through his address book.

He found the number and punched it.

Detective Doresh answered, “Homicide,” and Jeremy said, “I was wondering why a black woman would have a name like Mazursky.”

“Who’s — Dr. Carrier? What’s going on?”

“It just struck me as odd,” said Jeremy.
It struck me as profoundly disordered.
“Then I thought: Maybe she used an alias. Because prostitutes do that. I’ve seen it — we treat them here at the hospital, they come in for their STDs — sexually transmitted diseases — and their nonspecific urinary tract infections, malnutrition, dental problems, hepatitis C. One woman will have five different charts. We don’t expect much in the way of reimbursement, but we do try to bill the state because the administrators order us to. But with prostitutes it’s mostly futile, because of how rapidly they switch names. They do it to fool the courts — to conceal evidence of prior arrests. So maybe that’s what she did. Tyrene Mazursky. Maybe there’s more to her than one identity.”