Sole Survivor

Page 14

‘Scares you?’ Georgine was astonished. ‘Lisa, dear, how on earth could it scare you?’
‘You’ll see,’ Lisa told Joe. This woman, usually blessed with the strength of stones, shivered like a reed. ‘But I guarantee you, Charlie and Georgine are two of the most level-headed people I know. Which you’re sure going to need to keep in mind when they get started.’
Picking up the Polaroid snapshot, Georgine gazed needfully at it, as though she wished not merely to burn it into her memory but to absorb the image and make it a physical part of her, leaving the film blank.
With a sigh, Lisa launched into a revelation: ‘I have my own weird piece to add to the puzzle, Joey. A year ago tonight, I was at LAX, waiting for Rose’s plane to land.’
Georgine looked up from the photo. ‘You didn’t tell us that.’
‘I was about to,’ Lisa said, ‘when Joey rang the doorbell.’
At the far end of the kitchen, with a soft pop, a stubborn cork came free from a wine bottle, and Charlie Delmann grunted with satisfaction.
‘I didn’t see you at the airport that night, Lisa,’ Joe said.
‘I was keeping a low profile. Torn up about Rose but also… flat out scared.’
‘You were there to pick her up?’
‘Rose called me from New York and asked me to be at LAX with Bill Hannett.’
Hannett was the photographer whose images of natural and manmade disasters hung on the walls of the reception lounge at the Post.
The pale-blue fabric of Lisa’s eyes was worn now with worry. ‘Rose desperately needed to talk to a reporter, and I was the only one she knew she could trust.’
‘Charlie,’ Georgine said, ‘you’ve got to come hear this.’
‘I can hear, I can hear,’ Charlie assured her. ‘Just pouring now. A minute.’
‘Rose also gave me a list — six other people she wanted there,’ Lisa said. ‘Friends from years back. I managed to locate five of them on short notice and bring them with me that night. They were to be witnesses.’
Rapt, Joe said, ‘Witnesses to what?’
‘I don’t know. She was so guarded. Excited, really excited about something, but also frightened. She said she was going to be getting off that plane with something that would change all of us forever, change the world.’
‘Change the world?’ Joe said. ‘Every politician with a scheme and every actor with a rare thought thinks he can change the world these days.’
‘Oh, but in this case, Rose was right,’ Georgine said. Barely contained tears of excitement or joy shone in her eyes as she showed him the gravestone photo once more. ‘It’s wonderful.’
If he had fallen down the White Rabbit’s hole, Joe didn’t notice the plunge, but the territory in which he now found himself was increasingly surrealistic.
The flames in the oil lamps, which had been steady, flared and writhed in the tall glass chimneys, drawn upward by a draft that Joe could not feel.
Salamanders of yellow light wriggled across the previously dark side of Lisa’s face. When she looked at the lamps, her eyes were as yellow as moons low on the horizon.
Quickly the flames subsided, and Lisa said, ‘Yeah, sure, it sounded melodramatic. But Rose is no bullshit artist. And she has been working on something of enormous importance for six or seven years. I believed her.’
Between the kitchen and the downstairs hall, the swinging door made its distinctive sound. Charlie Delmann had left the room without explanation.
‘Charlie?’ Georgine rose from her chair. ‘Now where’s he gone? I can’t believe he’s missing this.’
To Joe, Lisa said, ‘When I spoke to her on the phone a few hours before she boarded Flight 353, Rose told me they were looking for her. She didn’t think they would expect her to show up in L.A. But just in case they figured out what flight she was on, in case they were waiting for her, Rose wanted us there too, so we could surround her the minute she got off the plane and
prevent them from silencing her. She was going to give me the whole story right there at the debarkation gate.’
‘They?’ Joe asked.
Georgine had started after Charlie to see where he’d gone, but interest in Lisa’s story got the better of her, and she returned to her chair.
Lisa said, ‘Rose was talking about the people she works for.’
‘Teknologik.’
‘You’ve been busy today, Joey.’
‘Busy trying to understand,’ he said, his mind now swimming through a swamp of hideous possibilities.
‘You and me and Rose all connected. Small world, huh?’
Sickened to think there were people murderous enough to kill three hundred and twenty innocent bystanders merely to get at their true target, Joe said, ‘Lisa, dear God, tell me you don’t think that plane was brought down just because Rose Tucker was on it.’
Staring out at the shimmering blue light of the pool, Lisa thought about her answer before giving it. ‘That night I was sure of it. But then… the investigation showed no sign of a bomb. No probable cause really fixed. If anything, it was a combination of a minor mechanical error and human error on the part of the pilots.’
‘At least that’s what we’ve been told.’
‘I spent time quietly looking into the National Transportation Safety Board, not on this crash so much as in general. They have an impeccable record, Joey. They’re good people. No corruption. They’re even pretty much above politics.’
Georgine said, ‘But I believe Rose thinks she was responsible for what happened. She’s convinced that her being there was the cause of it.’
‘But if she’s even indirectly responsible for the death of your daughter,’ Joe said, ‘why do you find her so wonderful?’
Georgine’s smile was surely no different from the one with which she had greeted — and charmed — him at the front door. To Joe, however, in his growing disorientation, her expression seemed to be as strange and unsettling as might be the smile on a clown encountered in a fog-threaded alley after midnight, alarming because it was so profoundly out of place. Through her disturbing smile, she said, ‘You want to know why, Joe? Because this is the end of the world as we know it.’
To Lisa, Joe said exasperatedly, ‘Who is Rose Tucker? What does she do for Teknologik?’
‘She’s a geneticist, and a brilliant one.’
‘Specializing in recombinant DNA research.’ Georgine held up the Polaroid again, as if Joe should be able to grasp at once how the photo of a gravestone and genetic engineering were related.
‘Exactly what she was doing for Teknologik,’ Lisa said, ‘I never knew. That’s what she was going to tell me when she landed at LAX a year ago tonight. Now, because of what she told Georgine and Charlie yesterday… I can pretty much figure it out. I just don’t know how to believe it.’
Joe wondered about her odd locution: not whether to believe it, but how to believe it.
‘What is Teknologik — besides what it appears to be?’ he asked.
Lisa smiled thinly. ‘You have a good nose, Joe. A year off hasn’t dulled your sense of smell. From things Rose said over the years, vague references, I think you’re looking at a singularity in a capitalist world — a company that can’t fail.’
‘Can’t fail?’ Georgine asked.
‘Because behind it there’s a generous partner that covers all the losses.’
‘The military?’ Joe wondered.
‘Or some branch of government. Some organization with deeper pockets than any individual in the world. I got the sense, from Rose, that this project wasn’t funded with just a hundred million of research and development funds. We’re talking major capital on the line here. There were billions behind this.’
From upstairs came the boom of a gunshot.
Even muffled by intervening rooms, the nature of the sound was unmistakable.
The three of them came to their feet as one, and Georgine said, ‘Charlie?’
Perhaps because he had so recently sat with Bob and Clarise in that cheery yellow living room in Culver City, Joe immediately thought of Nora Vadance na*ed in the patio chair, the butcher knife grasped in both hands with the point toward her abdomen.
In the wake of the gunshot’s echo, the silence settling down through the house seemed as deadly as the invisible and weight­less rain of atomic radiation in the sepulchral stillness following nuclear thunder.
Alarm growing, Georgine shouted, ‘Charlie!’
As Georgine started away from the table, Joe restrained her. ‘No, wait, wait. I’ll go. Call nine-one-one, and I’ll go.’
Lisa said, ‘Joey—’
‘I know what this is,’ he said sharply enough to forestall further discussion.
He hoped that he was wrong, that he didn’t know what was happening here, that it had nothing to do with what Nora Vadance had done to herself. But if he was right, then he couldn’t allow Georgine to be the first on the scene. In fact, she shouldn’t have to see the aftermath at all, not now or later.
‘I know what this is. Call nine-one-one,’ Joe repeated as he crossed the kitchen and pushed through the swinging door into the downstairs hall.
In the foyer, the chandelier dimmed and brightened, dimmed and brightened, like the flickering lights in one of those old prison movies when the governor’s call came too late and the condemned man was fried in the electric chair.
Joe ran to the foot of the stairs but then was slowed by dread as he ascended toward the second floor, terrified that he would find what he expected.
A plague of suicide was as irrational a concept as any brewed in the stew-pot minds of those people who thought that the mayor was a robot and that evil aliens were watching them every moment of the day. Joe couldn’t comprehend how Charlie Delmann could have gone from near euphoria to despair in the space of two minutes — as Nora Vadance had gone from a pleasant breakfast and the newspaper comics pages to self-evisceration without even pausing to leave a note of explanation.
If Joe was right about the meaning of the shot, however, there was a slim chance that the doctor was still alive. Maybe he hadn’t done himself in with only one round. Maybe he could still be saved.
The prospect of saving a life, after so many had slipped like water through his hands, pushed Joe forward in spite of his dread. He climbed the rest of the stairs two at a time.
On the second floor, with barely a glance, he passed unlighted rooms and closed doors. At the end of the hallway, from behind a half-open door, came ruddy light.
The master suite was entered through a small foyer of its own. Beyond lay the bedroom, furnished with bone-coloured con­temporary upholstery. The graceful pale-green curves of Sung Dynasty pottery, displayed on glass shelves, imposed serenity on the chamber.
Dr. Charles Delmann was sprawled on a Chinese sleigh bed.
Across him lay a Mossberg 12-gauge, pump-action, pistol-grip shotgun. Because of the short barrel, he had been able to put the muzzle between his teeth and easily reach the trigger. Even in the poor light, Joe could see there was no reason to check for a pulse.
The celadon lamp on the farther of the two nightstands provided the only illumination. The glow was ruddy because the shade was splashed with blood.
On a Saturday night ten months ago, in the course of covering a story, Joe had visited the city morgue, where the bagged bodies on the gurneys and the na*ed bodies on the autopsy tables waited for the attention of overworked pathologists. Abruptly he was gripped by the irrational conviction that the cadavers surrounding him were those of his wife and children; all of them were Michelle and the girls, as though Joe had wandered into a scene in a science fiction movie about clones. And from within the body-size drawers of the stainless-steel coolers, where more of the dead rested between destinations, arose the muffled voices of Michelle, Chrissie, little Nina, pleading with him to release them to the world of the living. Beside him, a coroner’s assistant zipped open a body bag, and Joe looked down into the winter-white face of a dead woman, her painted mouth like a poinsettia leaf crumpled on snow, and he saw Michelle, Chrissie, Nina. The dead woman’s blind blue eyes were mirrors of his own soaring madness. He had walked out of the morgue and submitted his resignation to Caesar Santos, his editor.
Now, he quickly turned away from the bed before any beloved faces materialized over that of the dead physician.
An eerie wheezing came to his attention, and for an instant he thought that Delmann was straining to draw breath through his shattered face. Then he realized that he was listening to his own ragged breathing.
On the nearer nightstand, the lighted green numbers on a digital clock were flashing. Time changes were occurring at a frantic pace:
ten minutes with every flash, the hours reversing through the early evening and backward into the afternoon.
Joe had the crazy thought that the malfunctioning clock — which must have been hit by a stray shotgun pellet — might magically undo all that had happened, that Delmann might rise from death as the pellets rattled backward into the barrel and torn flesh re-knit, that in a moment Joe himself might be on the Santa Monica Beach once more, in the sun, and then back in his one-room apartment
in the moon-deep night, on the telephone with Beth in Virginia, and backward, still backward, until Flight 353 had not yet gone down in Colorado.
From downstairs came a scream, imploding his desperate fan­tasy. Then another scream.
He thought it was Lisa. As tough as she was, she had probably never before screamed in her life, yet this was a cry of sheerest childlike terror.
He had been gone from the kitchen for at most a minute. What could have happened in a minute, so fast?
He reached toward the shotgun, intending to pluck it off the corpse. The magazine might contain other rounds.
No. Now it’s a suicide scene. Move the weapon, and it looks like a murder scene. With me as the suspect.
He left the gun untouched.
Out of the thin blood-filtered light, into the hallway where a funerary stillness of shadows stood sentinel, toward the enormous chandelier that hung in a perpetual crystal rain above the foyer staircase, he ran.
The shotgun was useless. He wasn’t capable of firing it at anyone. Besides, who was in the house but Georgine and Lisa? No one. No one.
Down the stairs two at a time, three at a time, under the crystal cascade of bevelled teardrops, he grabbed at the banister to keep his balance. His palm, slick with cold sweat, slid across the mahogany.
Along the lower hall in a thunder of footsteps, he heard jangly music, and as he slammed through the swinging door, he saw pendulous copper pots and pans swinging on the racks overhead, gently clinking together.