I saw her look me over. There were the cuts from spilling out onto Highway 101, and the fading bruises from a life-or-death fight on a stairway in Boston. There could have been new marks, from the scuffle on her terrace.
For the first time in six years, I wasn’t embarrassed by any of it.
“It’s Meredith,” she said. “Ms. Miles sounds like someone’s grade school teacher.”
33
There was no time to tell her more. Her phone rang, and she answered it. It wasn’t on speaker, but I could hear Leon’s small voice just the same.
“I let them through the gate,” he said. “They’re driving up now.”
“Who else was with him?”
“His mother.”
“Thank you,” she said. She hung up and looked at me. “Tell me what you want. Then I’ll tell you what I’m willing to do.”
“He’s going to make a presentation, right?”
“That’s right—a sales pitch. When you were a kid, did your parents ever go to a Tupperware party? It’s like that, except the cheapest package is ten million dollars.”
“That’s a lot of Tupperware.”
“What do you want?”
“To watch, and listen. When he leaves, I want to follow him.”
“That’s it?”
“I won’t do anything in your house.”
“You already did—that man, outside.”
“Aside from that.”
“Anything else?”
“Larsen sent a man to kill me in Boston. That same day, he had people toss my office and bug my apartment. He knows my name and my face. It’d be better if I didn’t mingle with your guests.”
“Agreed.”
“So what can you do?”
“This is a take-it-or-leave-it proposition, and you’ve got about thirty seconds.”
“Go ahead.”
“I told you the house is wired up.”
She picked up a remote control and pointed it at a flatscreen television on the far wall. She sorted through an onscreen menu and hit a button, and then we were looking at the sunken den. The camera was hidden somewhere high up, so we were looking down at her guests. The volume was low, but I could hear the murmur of half a dozen conversations. People who had come to rub shoulders with their peers, drink wine, and listen to a devil’s proposition.
“You can watch from here,” she said. “And you’ll leave before he does. Out the door, turn right, and go to the back of the house. You already know about the terrace.”
“Yes.”
“Agreed?”
“It’ll do just fine,” I said. “But there’s the matter of the guy in your hot tub.”
“Leon will take care of him,” she said.
“If you just kick him loose, he’s going to come after me again.”
“Leon’s dealt with prowlers. Larsen’s man won’t be doing anything for a couple of days except taking aspirin.”
“And if he reports you to the cops?”
She was turning to leave, but stopped before opening the door.
“He won’t,” she said. “They never do.”
“If it works for you, then it’s fine with me.”
“I won’t see you again, Mr. Crowe. So this is goodbye.”
Then she opened the door and left. I locked it after her, then went back to the drafting table. Meredith Miles wrote her scripts while perched on a teak and canvas director’s chair. I pulled it out and sat down, then picked up the silenced pistol and looked at it. It was in good shape. A well-maintained and well-loved tool. I could smell the burnt sulfur of recent shots. It had been fired since the last time it was cleaned. The right thing to do would be to hand it over to LAPD, who could take it to their ballistics lab. They’d probably tie it to unsolved crimes from coast to coast. But that was never going to happen. There was a good chance I’d be using it tonight.
Larsen and his mother came into view five minutes later. She was the same woman I’d seen in the redwood grove at the Creekside, just before getting knocked cold. A tall blonde, her hair braided carefully and pinned up at the back of her head. She could have been Claire or Madeleine, visiting from the future. They all had the same face, the same curves, the same smooth skin. But this woman moved carefully. Not with the lissome grace of a dancer, but with the fragility of the infirm. She crossed the room and sat down at the end of a low couch, aloof and alone. A waitress came by with a tray of wineglasses and scurried off just as quickly, dismissed with a glance.
Larsen took the opposite approach. He worked the room, moving easily from group to group. Of course he’d press the flesh. He’d made big claims that came with an equally outsized asking price. If a third of the people present bought his cheapest package, he’d leave here fifty million dollars richer. He wore a dark suit jacket over a black, collarless shirt. His blond hair reached his shoulders. The body beneath his jacket looked broad and muscular. He was exactly what Larry had described to me. And he and his mother could have passed as siblings. Which is to say that there was no visible age difference between them, and it would have been impossible to state how old either of them was.
After he’d met and greeted everyone in the room, he stepped into the empty space by his mother and pulled out his phone. I watched him dial, watched him hold the phone to his ear. And then a phone began to vibrate in my pocket. It wasn’t Elijah’s, but the one I’d taken from Larsen’s man.
I pulled it out and looked at the screen. The incoming number had no name attached to it. Larsen had instructed his man well. He didn’t want to be listed in the contacts. Which meant that the phone Larsen was using was probably a burner, or registered through some hopeless trail of limited liability companies. I grabbed one of Meredith’s pens, took a page from the untitled script, and wrote the number down. There was no way I was going to answer, but the phone was giving me a couple of other options. I could tap a button and send a preset text response.
Sorry, I can’t talk right now.
I’m on my way.
I’ll call you later.
I knew I couldn’t talk to Larsen, but I could needle him a little bit. I picked the last option, because it sounded the least subservient. I wasn’t up to my ears in some big problem that I was solving for him. I wasn’t rushing to his side. I’d let him down in Laytonville, but that wasn’t really on my mind. I know you’re calling, boss, but I’m ignoring you. I’ll call you when I feel like it. Until then, fuck off.
I turned the phone off and put it back in my pocket. Meanwhile, I was watching the TV screen. Larsen read my text, and stiffened. He leaned down and whispered something in his mother’s ear. Then he turned and looked around. Meredith Miles had just appeared, joining a group at the other side of the den. Larsen came to her. They did the requisite air kiss. One side, then the other. No touching at all, but not because Larsen didn’t try. I couldn’t hear what he said to her; there were too many other conversations going on at once.
But after he finished speaking, Meredith signaled the nearest waitress. Time to go. In fifteen seconds, every uniformed person in the room had cleared out. Remaining in place were fifteen Hollywood power brokers, plus Larsen, and his mother, whose look of cold disdain hadn’t changed since she’d walked into the room.
I watched Meredith tap the rim of a champagne flute with a cocktail fork. The room fell silent, and faces turned toward her.
“I guess one way or another, we all know why we’re here,” she said. “And I think you’ve all met Mr. Larsen by now. The servers are gone, so if you want anything else, you’ll have to pour your own drink—but everyone here probably lost that skill long ago.”
Her crowd responded with a polite laugh.
“So, Mr. Larsen,” she said, turning to him. “Go right ahead.”
Larsen reached into his jacket and came out with a slim black remote. He stood looking at it, his head down, then looked up and hit a button. His advance man had installed equipment around the perimeter of Meredith’s sunken den, and now those machi
nes were whirring to life.
There was a bank of angled mirrors mounted to black motor housings on the ceiling. They began to spin, and from around the room, a dozen laser projectors, placed on all the walls, cast their beams upward. What appeared next was pure sleight of hand. A carefully orchestrated miracle of light and interference.
A tiny star appeared, floating four feet above Meredith’s floor. It rotated slowly, showing its light pink corona, pulsing, growing larger. The gathered guests stepped back and gave it space.
“This is how you began—how we all began,” Larsen said. “A single cell that split in two.”
The star was now the size of an orange. It began to contract in the middle, as though unseen hands were tightening a belt around its equator. One orb became two, pressed tightly against each other.
“From that moment, the clock was ticking,” Larsen said. He looked at his audience, making eye contact with anyone who wasn’t focused on the hologram. “We have only so many days in this life. Time slips through the glass. You’ve been dying since the moment you were born.”
Floating in front of them, the holographic cells began to divide at an exponential rate. An embryo was taking shape. It grew into a fetus, and then into a newborn. The infant descended to the floor. It lay there, naked and shivering—and aging. There was a child, who grew into a woman. Just as her beauty was in full blossom, she aged into a centenarian, gray-skinned and shriveled.
Larsen hit a button and the presentation paused. The naked old woman lay frozen on the floor. She was shimmering. A sculpture in light.
“This is the path you’re on. The only one you thought was possible. You didn’t choose it. There was no choice. At best you’re resigned to it—to grow old, to wither, to die.”
He looked around again.
“Or maybe you’re not so resigned, are you? You’re here, after all. You heard something. A rumor. And as much as you ever wanted anything, you wanted to believe that there might be another way.”
He lifted his remote. On the floor, the shimmering woman began to stir. She stood up. Naked, and hunched. Her skin sagged with age. She hugged herself against the cold. Her face was turned down, hidden behind ropes of unwashed hair.
“Any clock can be reset. With just one minute to midnight, you can still turn it back.”
The woman was standing taller. The wrinkles were disappearing from her skin. She dropped her hands from her chest and revealed full breasts. She pushed her suddenly blond hair aside and raised her clear face.
We were looking at Madeleine.
Except that it wasn’t Madeleine. Not quite. The holographic woman appeared to be older by ten or fifteen years. She turned around once, slowly. And then, like a light bulb going out, she disappeared. Larsen took her place at the center of the sunken den.
“I think you’ve all met my mother.”
All eyes turned toward her, but she didn’t look up. She sat at the edge of the couch, face turned to the side, looking at nothing.
“About twenty years ago, she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukemia,” Larsen said. “She had less than a year to live. Her doctors proposed a course of chemotherapy that would have destroyed her bone marrow. She’d have to replace it later, with transplants from donors. A process that comes with its own complications and risks. Not to mention considerable pain. But I had a better idea. It wasn’t just a cure for cancer. It was a cure for everything—a way to turn back time.”
He looked around the room. Most of his audience had taken seats. Meredith was next to her first director, whispering something to him. Larsen cleared his throat.
“How many of you have heard of the young blood movement?”
Most of the hands in the room went up.
“And how many of you have tried it?”
Only two people raised their hands this time, including the director at Meredith’s side.
“It’s a simple concept,” Larsen said. “A child could have come up with it—draw blood from the young, and transfuse it into the old. The idea came from a study done on mice. They linked the circulatory systems of young mice and their older peers. New blood into old arteries. The older mice thrived. As much as you can thrive with another organism grafted onto you.”
Meredith leaned forward. The director put his hand on her bare knee, and she swatted it off, but didn’t take her eyes from Larsen.
“What did you do to your mother?”
“Almost exactly what her doctors recommended. We wiped out her bone marrow and replaced it with transplanted tissue.”
“Whose tissue did you use?”
“Her own,” Larsen said. He glanced at his mother. “We used bone marrow from her childhood. It’s what’s called an autologous haematopoietic stem cell graft. Replace the sick tissue with healthy tissue from the same patient. There were no complications from rejection. And because the tissue was harvested in her earliest youth, there were other benefits you couldn’t begin to imagine . . . Allow me.”
He stepped away from the center of the floor and triggered his projectors. A swirl of blue light began at the ceiling and descended toward the floor until it hovered at eye level. The light coalesced and took a new shape. We were looking at a concrete building. It stood alone in a snowy field. The image began to rotate. At the side of the building, there was a crude portico above a set of double doors. An ancient-looking ambulance was abandoned beneath it, all four of its tires missing.
“My first laboratory,” Larsen said. His voice had taken a hush of nostalgia. “It was nowhere near here. The powers that be frown on free thought. At least in this country, and particularly when it comes to stem cells.”
The hospital dissolved. Now we saw the inside of a lab. A man with blond hair to his shoulders worked at a bench, going between a microscope and a set of flickering computer screens. We couldn’t see his face, but didn’t need to.
“A stem cell is an amazing thing,” the real Larsen was saying. “It can differentiate into any kind of tissue. It can regenerate and renew.”
Light bled out of the microscope’s eyepieces and took a solid shape in the illusory laboratory’s air, allowing us to see what Larsen was looking at in the microscope. Cells in a suspension pulsed and divided.
“The stem cells in your bone marrow generate your blood. But that’s not all they’re capable of. With just a few modifications, they can travel through your circulatory system and renew whatever they touch. Heart tissue. Your liver. Your eyes. As healthy as they were when you were a child. And it’s not pills, or chemicals, or trendy diets. It’s your own body, turning back time.”
We saw a gray heart grow firm and healthy, a mottled liver become slick and brown. Next there was a child playing in a meadow. A lithesome teenager diving from a cliff toward the ocean. And then, in a flash, the sunken den became a sepia-toned morgue. The floor and the walls were made of small white tiles, like a subway station. Steel carts bore crude-looking instruments. There were shears that looked like they’d been forged in a blacksmith’s shop. Scalpels and bone saws. In the center of the room, beneath coned lights, was a gurney. A shrouded form lay upon it. Larsen walked through his illusion and stood next to the body.
“I imagine most if not all of you don’t have bone marrow from your childhood sitting in a freezer somewhere, ready for use. Well, what if someone found a way to harvest your DNA and implant it in a cell?” he asked. “And what if we could give that cell a spark of new life, so that it was born again, its clocks started from zero? All of the marks of age erased. Imagine what it would be like if those stem cells—your stem cells—were waiting for you in a vessel, growing in a perfect environment, until you were ready to harvest and receive them?”
He paused and let his audience study the morgue.
“If we could do that—if we could have a limitless supply of our own stem cells, but as fresh and vibrant as they were in our youth—we would have a wellspring inside us. A fountain of youth, inside our bones.”
Now the morgue d
isappeared. We were treated to a long hallway. A man was pushing the gurney through the gloom. Far ahead, there was a door. White light blazed from the crack beneath it, from the jamb, from the keyhole.
“I can open that door,” Larsen said. “I can take you to the other side. I can—”
“What are you saying?” Meredith asked.
“I found a way,” Larsen said. If she’d thrown him off, he rediscovered his balance quickly. He’d given this presentation before and expected questions. “I can take a tiny sample of your DNA. I can transfer it into the nucleus of a cell. I can plant it where it will grow. In less than a year—ten months, give or take—I can start to harvest bone marrow. Your bone marrow, but with the cellular clocks reset.”
“Is this cloning?” Meredith asked. “Human cloning?”
“Of course not.” His voice was serene. On the other side of the room, his mother still hadn’t moved a muscle. “This is just for stem cells.”
“How are you getting them?”
“I have a proprietary process. After I transfer the DNA—your DNA—I cultivate the cells inside an entirely disposable vessel.”
“What does that mean—a disposable vessel?”
“That’s the proprietary part.”
“Proprietary as in patented?”
Larsen shook his head.
“Patents are part of the public record, and the protection lasts only so long. But secrets last as long as you can keep them. And I keep them very well.”
“You need to give me more than that. You’re asking for ten million dollars.”
“Which is a quarter of what you made last year.”
“But more than I’d want to lose,” Meredith said. “I want to know what I’m really buying.”
“It’s not so simple to show you,” he said. “After all, we can’t cut my mother in half and count the rings.”
His mother glanced up but didn’t move beyond that.
“Then how are you going to prove this all really works? That you can really do this?” she asked. When Larsen began to raise his remote, she shook her head. “That’s just smoke and mirrors. Everyone here knows how to make a movie.”
Blood Relations Page 27
