The Fifth Vial

by Michael Palmer

  “Where did you learn to speak English so well?”

  “I am flattered that you would even think so. I spent a year in Missouri when I was in school. Have you been in Rio long?”

  Natalie shook her head.

  “I haven’t even checked into my hotel yet.”

  “Oh, and where is that?”

  Perhaps it was the nightmare with the cab driver, perhaps an eagerness—perceived or actual—in the man’s tone, but suddenly Natalie found herself wary. The last thing she needed at the moment was an amorous advance from a cop.

  “The Inter-Continental,” she lied, standing quickly. “Well, I’d better get there and register. Have a good day.”

  “Do you know the way? Perhaps I could—”

  “No, no. Thank you, though. This map and I are becoming the best of friends.”

  She refused to look the man in the eye for fear of seeing hurt, or worse, anger.

  “Very well, then,” he said. “May I wish that you have a wonderful time in Rio.”

  The Rui Mirador, a four-story brownstone, was as described on the travel site, quaint and clean. As for safety, the clerk at the small desk by the entrance assured Natalie that his post was manned 24/7.

  “We are each proficient in the use of this,” he said in Portuguese, proudly brandishing an ugly, long-barreled pistol, which he produced from a drawer beneath the counter.

  Not as confident in the hotel’s security system as she might have liked, Natalie registered nevertheless and toted her bag up three flights to a small room that featured little else save for a pair of twin platform beds. Two stars is two stars, she reminded herself, but she also knew sleep was going to be a problem. Unwilling to be placed at the mercy of the city by staying out late, she decided her most prudent move would, at some point, be the purchase of a bottle of fine Brazilian whiskey along with, perhaps, a visit to the pharmacy.

  It was just after noon by the time she had showered and changed into a beige linen suit and short-sleeved turquoise blouse. There was a microsized air conditioner in one of the two windows of her room, but at that point, neither the heat nor the humidity demanded its use. The Jeep was parked in a lot a block from the hotel, but her targets for this day, a police station or two and the hospital, could be reached by foot. Dense traffic—pedestrian and cars—also mitigated against driving, but then there was the matter of negotiating the hills. As it had been since the fire, her breathing was seldom natural and unintrusive. Satisfying, deep breaths were incredibly welcome when they occurred, but they were few and far between. She could have used two or three more weeks of pulmonary rehab, but her doctor and therapists had made it clear that even then, nothing at all would have been guaranteed except, perhaps, for a drop in her lung allocation score.

  The desk clerk was clearly curious about why she wanted to visit two or three police stations—especially since she seemed to have little idea that there were three completely different police forces—municipal, tourist, and military. With the help of the phone book, he marked one station of each on her map and pointed her in the right direction. In fact, the man’s conclusions were incorrect. Following her return home, Natalie had learned as much about the various police forces in Brazil as repeated Internet searches could teach her. What she gleaned did not make her that comfortable in relying on any of them, or in believing that her near-kidnapping in one of the favelas north and west of the downtown area would ever be investigated.

  Anxious not to run into the officer from the Pasmado Overlook, and reasoning that he might still be out on patrol, perhaps searching out other female tourists to welcome, she chose to start at the station of the Military Police. It was a modern, single-story brick and glass structure on Rua São Clemente, about half the size of an average McDonald’s back in Boston, and just as crowded. The officer at the front desk, after she asked him to please speak a little slower, referred her back to a Detective Perreira, short and at least forty pounds overweight, with a pencil-thin mustache and a cold smile. His English was serviceable, though broken and heavily accented, but Natalie decided against telling him that her Portuguese was probably better.

  “So, I see that was quite a difficult welcoming to our city,” he said after she had told him her story and presented him with one of the hundred copies of a flyer she had made on her computer. The single sheet included a photo of her, and a summary, in her mother’s Portuguese, of the events of her attack as she remembered them, or could piece them together.

  “I can’t fully describe to you how terrible an experience it was to be attacked in such a way,” she said. “The taxi driver said he was going to take me to a place called the House of Love.”

  Perreira reacted not at all, but instead began typing on his computer keyboard while Natalie waited, trying not to stare at the massive pseudo-chin rolling out from beneath his real one.

  “And you say that this crime which occurred on you was reported to the police?” he asked finally.

  “I was in a deep coma when I was found, but I was told the police had called the ambulance that brought me to the hospital.”

  “Santa Teresa Hospital.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you telephoned to them and they mentioned that they have no record of you as being a patient there.”

  “I am going to Santa Teresa’s when I leave here to see if I can straighten that confusion out.”

  “And certain you are the dates you have given to me are correct?”

  “I am.”

  Perreira sighed audibly and tapped his stubby fingertips together.

  “Senhorita Reyes,” he said, “we Military Police pay very close attention to people who get shot in our cities—especially tourists. We have to uphold to a reputation.”

  In her more cynical days, Natalie most certainly would have asked for clarification of precisely what reputation he was talking about. Her research had revealed much about the role of the Military Police in the death squads that were believed to be responsible for the murders of hundreds, if not thousands, of street urchins over the years, including the notorious massacre in 1993 when fifty street children were shot and eight killed in front of the Candelária Church.

  “So, what have you learned about my shooting?” she asked, motioning toward the computer.

  “The databases of the Military Police I have searched, and also the, how do you say, civil or municipal police, and then also the tourist police.”

  “Yes?”

  “There are in none of them records of anyone of your name to have been shot on the dates you have written here.”

  “But what about—”

  “I have checked also for unknown females shot on those dates. Also none.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “Perhaps it does and perhaps it does not. Senhorita Reyes, you say you are student.”

  “A medical student, yes.”

  “In our country, students are very often poor. Do you own much money?”

  Natalie sensed where the man was headed and began to burn.

  “I am older than most students,” she said coolly. “I have enough money to take care of myself. Detective Perreira, please get to the point.”

  “The point…Let me see…. I am sure that being as a medical student, you know that in countries such as this, ‘Third World countries’ I have heard you Americans call us, some people in desperate need for money sell on the black market a kidney or part of a liver or even a lung. The payments to them, I have heard, often are quite high.”

  “So even if I sold my lung on the black market, which I most certainly did not, why would I be here?”

  Perreira’s mirthless smile was triumphant.

  “Guilt,” he replied. “Guilt over what have you done, joined with denial that you did actually do it. Pardon me for saying this fact, senhorita, but in a lifetime of working on this job, I have seen stranger things—much stranger.”

  Natalie had heard enough. She knew there was nothing to be gained by losing her temper
at the policeman, and potentially much to lose. The police in Brazil were answerable to few besides themselves, and the Military Police were, from what she could tell, the most dangerously autonomous of all.

  “Believe me, Detective Perreira,” she said, standing and gathering her things, “I would look a dozen times for a deficiency in your computer system before looking for one in me. If something comes up, I am staying at the Hotel Rui Mirador.”

  She whirled and marched through the crowd and out of the little station. It wasn’t until she was on the street that she realized her brief outburst had left her considerably short of breath.

  The next four hours were an exhausting blur. On paper—specifically her map—Santa Teresa’s looked to be no more than six or seven blocks from the Military Police station. Had the map been topographical, Natalie might have hailed a cab. The hills were steep and unavoidable, and the walk across Botafogo, however picturesque, was slow going in the mounting afternoon heat. By the time she passed through the main entrance to the hospital, she could feel the perspiration beneath her clothes.

  The main structure of the sprawling hospital, four monolithic stories of stone, a block in every direction, looked like it might have been built by Brazilian discoverer Pedro Cabral in the early sixteenth century. To that central core, now modernized inside, wings and towers had been added in a dozen different architectural styles. Natalie chose to visit the administrative offices first, and hit pay dirt immediately—at least in a manner of speaking.

  A vice president by the name of Gloria Duarte seemed quite interested in her as an accomplished, intelligent woman, and was sincerely sympathetic with her plight. They conversed in Portuguese, although from a glance at the woman’s extensive library, Natalie sensed Duarte, warm, urbane, quick-witted, and insightful, could have communicated in any number of languages, including English.

  “What disturbs me most of your story,” Duarte said, “is how sure you are, backed by your mentor, Doctor—”

  “Berenger. Douglas Berenger.”

  “Dr. Berenger, that the physician who did the surgery on you was someone named Xavier Santoro. We have no such physician on this staff, and I know of none in the city, although perhaps you should contact the state medical association.”

  “I did. You are right. There is no physician by that name.”

  “I see…. Well, one step at a time, I suppose.”

  “One step at a time,” Natalie repeated, chagrined that Duarte’s enthusiasm might have cooled.

  “I would like to say that patients never fall through the cracks of our hospital,” the woman went on, “but that is simply not the case. We have all together more than two thousand beds, and they are full much of the time. A simple clerical error and all of your records might exist under a name one letter different from your own. So take heart. I suspect this part of your mystery will be solved quickly, and that the solution will prove to be trivial and mundane.”

  With that, she sent Natalie to the security office for a visitor’s identification badge that would allow her access to any area of the hospital, including the record room and all of the medical and surgical wards. She also had copies of Natalie’s flyer made and instructed her secretary to distribute them to all hospital departments with an addendum to notify Duarte herself of any information, however remote the connection might seem.

  A quick espresso in a courtyard café outside the administrative wing, and Natalie headed for the record room. Reyes, Reyez, Rayes. Seated at a terminal in a carrel with one of the record-room clerks, she tried every permutation she could think of without success, and went through records on unknown females as well. Next she headed to the medical, then the surgical intensive care units. She had some recollection of two of her nurses’ faces, and also of Santoro’s, and wistfully hoped she might simply run into one of them.

  Even in a city like New York or Rio, an unknown woman found shot and almost naked in an alley, and subsequently losing her lung, would have been a top cluster on the hospital grapevine. Sooner, rather than later, everyone would have heard about it. In fact, none of the nurses in either of the units had.

  At five, bewildered and at an absolute loss for explanations, but physically unable to go on this day, Natalie shuffled from the hospital. Six weeks ago she had flown to Brazil, she had been attacked and shot in an alley, and she had lost her lung. Those were the givens. Somehow, someplace, there was an explanation that would tie these truths together. She checked her map, and chose a route back to her hotel that involved the largest and, she assumed, the flattest streets. The late-afternoon sun was somewhat subdued by haze, and the temperature was bearable.

  She had flown to Brazil. She had been attacked. She had lost her lung.

  The thought, roiling through her brain, kept her from appreciating the incredible beauty of the city, or any of the burgeoning, vibrant, rush-hour pedestrians, most probably making their way home. Despite all the guidebooks’ descriptions of laid-back Cariocas, the street corners were much like New York—masses of people, shoulder to shoulder, often eight or ten deep, jockeying for position to cross while cars and taxis tried to wring every single moment out of each green light.

  Natalie was at a particularly busy intersection, sardined in, perhaps the third or fourth row of bodies, when she heard a woman’s voice speaking in Portuguese not far from her ear.

  “Please do not turn around, Dr. Reyes. Please do not look at me. Just listen. Dom Angelo has the answers that you seek. Dom Angelo.”

  At that instant, the light changed and the phalanx moved forward across the street, sweeping Natalie helplessly along. She was on the curb at the far side before she turned, scanning the faces around her, and peering through the crowd toward the corner they had just left. No one seemed the least bit interested in her. She was about to give up and focus on the strange message when she caught sight of a heavyset woman wearing a brightly flowered housedress, walking urgently away from her, moving with a fairly pronounced lurch as if one of her hips were bad. A man’s voice, demanding that she move out of the way, diverted Natalie’s attention for just a moment. When she turned back, the woman was gone.

  Natalie was stuck again toward the center of the pedestrian centipede, and with autos speeding past to clear the intersection, there was no way she could head back until the light changed. When she finally reached the previous block, the woman in the brightly colored dress was nowhere on the street. She hurried up to the next intersection and scanned both ways. Nothing.

  Slightly winded by her efforts, Natalie leaned against the façade of a clothing boutique. There was no doubt in her mind that the voice that had spoken to her belonged to the woman with the limp—no doubt because she felt certain the two of them had met earlier in the afternoon, albeit only in passing, in the surgical ICU at Santa Teresa Hospital.

  Twenty-Four

  Necessity…is the mother of invention.

  —PLATO, The Republic, Book II

  “It’s Stepanski. Seth Stepanski, the flight attendant.”

  “Welcome to Whitestone, Mr. Stepanski. After the gate opens, please drive directly to Building Six in the Oasis and come in to register. You have your own uniform?”

  “Yes. Yes I do.”

  “Excellent. We’ll see you here in just a minute.”

  The gate, ten-foot-high heavy chain-link topped with razor wire, glided soundlessly to Ben’s right, opening onto a ruler-straight road that looked to be at least a quarter of a mile long. Driving Stepanski’s Sebring convertible, he approached the compound slowly. In the wheel well, where the spare had been, was his detective’s valise, and tucked beneath that was his .38.

  The conglomeration of eight or nine pink-washed adobe structures glowed in the late-afternoon sun. Two dozen good-sized trees, the only significant vegetation and shade for miles, greatly reduced the starkness of the place, which he assumed was what the intercom voice had referred to as the Oasis.

  One of the buildings, Ben knew, probably the largest, housed a laborato
ry. The technicians working there were probably unaware of the evil in which they were accomplices as they tissue-typed and electronically catalogued millions of green-topped vials from unsuspecting clients all over the country—probably even the world.

  The notion sickened him.

  Beside the engine of the Sebring, the thrum of massive rooftop air-conditioning units was the only sound penetrating the hot, still Texas air. As he approached a pair of trees, flanking the roadway like sentinels, Ben caught sight of the Adventurer, parked toward the right rear of the Oasis. He couldn’t shake the painful suspicion that some version of Lonnie Durkin was imprisoned inside, frightened beyond imagination as he or she waited to be told why they were there.

  Ben had darkened his hair and bought a pair of heavy-rimmed glasses, but made no other attempt to change his appearance. The picture in Stepanski’s passport was slightly blurred, well-worn, and seven years old. He was five years Ben’s junior, but had similar enough coloring and facial shape to make Ben’s passing for him not too much of a stretch. Best of all, the flight attendant, now a resident of Unit 89 of the Budget Self-Storage Company, had made it clear that no one at Whitestone knew what he looked like.

  Unfortunately, Ben was unable, with any comfort, to make the same claim about himself. As he approached Building 6, he played over and over again his brief, violent encounter in the dilapidated garage on Laurel Way in Cincinnati. The whole fight with the man named Vincent couldn’t have lasted much more than half a minute. The lighting was minimal, and only once, a moment before the jet of black spray paint ended the struggle, did the killer get a straight-on look at his face. Was the man permanently blinded? Doubtful. Was he behind the wheel of the Adventurer as it rolled through Fadiman? If so, was he slated to be on board the upcoming flight? At that moment, the questions far outnumbered their answers.

  Building 6 was a fairly small office decorated with framed, artfully done posters of monuments from around the world. Standing behind a counter, following him with her eyes from the moment he entered, was a slender, middle-aged brunette with the bearing of a Marine. Her navy suit had the single word WHITESTONE embroidered in script just above the left breast pocket.