Greg Bear

by Vitals (v5)

  The quiet was absolute. Not even a breeze blew through the old buildings. We passed a warehouse, doors yawning open, the concrete floor covered with broken pallets and mildewing heaps of burlap. In a narrow alley between two picturesque and thoroughly broken-down chalets lay an abandoned Ford sedan, stripped to body and frame. It had keeled over on a jack that had finally let go, after who knew how many decades.

  Near the back of the town, separated from the other buildings, we found an office for the Thuringia Courier-Journal, a pretentious name for what I presumed was a one-sheet devoted to small-town flackery. Still, the door had not been boarded, and I thought it might be worth a look inside.

  “Think the sheriff will mind?” I asked. I prepared to make a run at it with my shoulder.

  “That’s stupid,” Lissa said. “You’ll break something.”

  I flexed my muscles. “Man of steel,” I said.

  The wood was old and weak, and the door gave with one slam. Dust flew everywhere. Pulling down a triumphant fist, I stepped into the darkness. As my eyes adjusted, I stared at stacks of posters, boxes filled with handouts, and a small gray desk.

  I carried a poster and pamphlet into the sunlight.

  “’Thuringia Farms, We ship everywhere,’” I read. “’Christmas, Thanksgiving, Any Holiday Occasion! World Famous Fruitcake, Walnut and Almond Baskets, Dried Fruit Samplers. Candified Oranges, Pineapple’—”

  “’Candified’?” Lissa smirked.

  “That’s what it says. ‘Dates and Olives, Deluxe Pitted Prunes from California’s Golden Hills. Satisfaction Guaranteed.’”

  “Keeps you regular,” Lissa said.

  “’Copyright 1950.’”

  I held up the poster:

  WELCOME TO PARADISE THURINGIA!

  SUN AND SPA, THERMAL SPRINGS

  HEALTHY LIVING

  AMERICA’S NEW VIGOR CAPITAL

  Female bathers in polite Esther Williams suits posed on rock walls and dipped their feet into a steaming pool. All smiles. Vigor and white teeth and fifties-style pillar thighs everywhere.

  “Let’s find the bathhouse,” I suggested. “Looks sociable.”

  “Let’s not and say we did,” Lissa said. But the light words did not cover her pallor. She didn’t like the place one bit. To me, it seemed sad and stupid but, so far, no cause for alarm.

  The spa was a brick-and-stone blockhouse on the east end of town. Another run of chain link surrounded it, this time with a locked gate, and an even larger sign announced, NATURAL POLLUTION SITE. There was more detail in fine print:

  WARNING.

  DO NOT BATHE OR DRINK FROM SPRINGS.

  CALIFORNIA STATE DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH

  And below that, in heavy block letters,

  BACTERIAL CONTAMINATION.

  “Curious?” I asked.

  “No,” Lissa said.

  I took the rock and whacked at the lock on the gate. It broke after three tries, and the gate opened with a shrill whine. Lissa followed a few steps behind.

  The main entrance had been bricked up, but around the side, a service door sported another latch and lock. That one took five whacks. I grabbed the hanging lock and pulled the door wide, then peered into the darkness.

  Inside water dripped and rushed. Sunlight fell in narrow shafts from gaps in boarded-up clerestory windows. Lissa touched my shoulder but said nothing. After a minute, my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom. The air smelled sulfurous, as befitted a genuine hot spring.

  “Phew,” I said, and waved my hand to dispel not just the stench, but a nervous reluctance to look any further.

  A brick walkway led to three steaming pools, the biggest about twenty feet long, all filled with dark, rippling water. A nine-inch pipe thrusting from the far wall spilled a continuous stream of hot water into the largest pool. The smaller pools took the overflow, where the water cooled to a temperature more comfortable for the uninitiated.

  I knelt beside the smallest pool. A thick film coated the surface, forming yellow islands in the middle and scummy coastlines around the sloshing gutters. I swirled the film with my rock and lifted it to examine and smell. Foul, not algae but bacteria, probably distantly related to the floc at the bottom of the sea, and dying upon exposure to the air in the bathhouse.

  I held the rock up to show it to Lissa, but she was no longer behind me. I stood and squinted into the shadows. Someone moved on the other side of the blockhouse. A ticking rose above the rush from the pipe: machinery, and still in working order. I thought I heard someone say something, broken syllables over the noise.

  “Lissa?”

  No answer. I walked around the pools and saw a large black box and a complex of pipes. Several of the pipes dropped into the big pool. All were painted red. They looked newer than the bathhouse and were well maintained, dusted, polished.

  Lissa came around the box and passed through a shaft of sun. Despite myself, I jumped.

  “What?” she said.

  I waved my hand feebly.

  “It’s steel,” she said. “There’s something inside, but I don’t think you’ll be able to burgle this one.”

  I walked around the box, about five feet square and seven feet high. The steel door resonated with strength. It was at least half an inch thick, like armor plate. A deep-set key lock was the only access.

  “Department of Health station?” I speculated.

  “Earthquake detection,” Lissa guessed. “You know, like in that movie, the water gets hotter if there’s going to be an eruption.”

  I hadn’t seen that one, either.

  We spent five minutes in the bathhouse until the smell drove us outside. I was no more enlightened than before we had entered. We retraced our path through the sad streets, and stood once more on Saxony Boulevard.

  Footsteps tapped behind us. Lissa and I spun around toward what turned out to be an echo, and saw a Highway Patrol car parked in the shadows behind a storage shed. We swiveled our necks as one to the right. A tall man in tight khaki uniform and Sam Browne belt, holstered .45 on his hip, approached with one thumb hooked into a belt loop and his gun hand swinging free. He wore a rakish Tom of Finland biker’s cap.

  I dropped the foul-smelling rock.

  “Hello!” Lissa greeted him bravely. Good cover, I thought. Safe white couple out for a drive in the back country. Nothing wrong here, ossifer. “What a wonderful old town! Is anything still open?”

  The uniformed man tipped his cap to her. His hand was ancient, with an odd little pucker between the tendons of each finger. Behind MacArthur sunglasses, his face resembled an apple dried in a hot oven. Feathery white hair poked from under his ridiculous cap.

  I couldn’t tell how old he was. Too old to be a cop.

  “Town’s off-limits,” he said, his voice like a scratchy 78. “Don’t drink the water.” He reached around behind his back and unhooked a holder for a big plastic bottle of Evian. “Days are hot. Bring my own. Truly, folks, you’re trespassing. People forget about private property. Found a door busted in. Nothing to steal.”

  At the end of the street, I could have sworn a gray figure watched from the inky shadow of a storefront awning. But it might have been an afterimage of the glint off the old man’s silver badge.

  “Nothing here, not even ghosts,” he said. “Most boring place on Earth. Nobody around but boring old farts. Even the dogs are old. Can I help you find your way back to the main road?”

  Lissa shook as we drove down the asphalt washboard to the old highway. “He’s following us,” she said, glancing in the rearview mirror.

  By then, I was shaking, too. “Christ, that car is vintage. And he is geriatric. Pretending to be a police officer.”

  “He has a gun,” Lissa said.

  A crazy old coot in a deserted town, driving behind us in a black-and-white straight out of the old Highway Patrol TV show my dad had watched in reruns when I was a toddler. Sunglasses. Clipped and polite.

  “Bacteria,” I said. “Hot springs full of bacteria, and not just fr
om dirty diapers, I’ll bet. A natural source, right out of the Earth. No wonder Rob was interested.”

  She said um and pointed to the backseat. “Get my purse.” I reached back, stretching my shoulder muscles, and tugged up the soft brown-leather handbag. It hung heavy in my grasp.

  She took the bag into her lap and pulled out an angular black pistol.

  “My father gave me some lessons, but that was years ago.” She poked the grip at me, and I took it from her. “Do you know how to shoot?” she asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “You know how to pull a trigger, don’t you?”

  “I suppose.” I felt the gun’s weight, its balance, like a piece of fine lab equipment, but simpler and more earnest. Death is easier than science. “Do you trust me?”

  “If you have to ask,” she said, “when I’ve just accompanied you into Fruitcake Hell, we’re being followed by a weird old geezer, and you’re holding my gun . . .”

  I twisted the pistol carefully. A Glock, just what Mrs. Callas had recommended. “It’s not loaded,” I guessed.

  “Yes, it is. It’s a law-enforcement model. It has a fifteen-round clip, and three more clips in the purse.”

  I checked.

  “He’s stopping,” Lissa said. She let out her breath. “No, he’s starting up again.”

  I spun my head around. The black-and-white was churning up dust at the side of the road. The clouds lay thick between us, and for a moment I couldn’t see what he was up to.

  Lissa accelerated gently, as if trying to outdistance a wary predator.

  The dust blew aside. The black-and-white had turned around and was heading back to Thuringia.

  “He’s gone,” I said.

  “Thank God,” Lissa said.

  It was then that I had that weird outland hunch that had been lurking for hours, a swooping revelation that chilled me right to the bone. Fruitcake, dried fruits and nuts, shipped all over the USA, straight out of one little California town, a commercial front for . . . what?

  Silk?

  Spraying mind-control germs on every little prune, over every holiday fruitcake, injecting them into packages of shelled almonds and walnuts. And all the while, collecting samples from hot springs that bubbled up stinking white clouds of the Little Mothers of the World.

  Rob could have come across something almost beyond belief. Screw the almost. I had to know more to even begin to believe. “Had enough?” I asked.

  “Have you?” she said.

  “San Jose,” I said, and shoved my finger down the rutted road.

  “Aren’t you tired?”

  “Let’s stop someplace for coffee,” I said.

  Lissa rubbed the back of her neck.

  “For Rob,” I said, and knew too late that I had pushed that button once too often.

  Her face turned to marble.

  “Where did you get the gun?” I asked.

  “None of your business,” she said. “And don’t you tell me one more time that we’re doing anything for Rob. You’re doing it because you’re curious, that’s all. He was curious, too, and he left me, remember? He was the one acting like an asshole and traveling all over the world. He wouldn’t listen, and now, neither will you.”

  I dropped the Glock into her purse. It made me nervous just looking at it. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She lifted her chin and rubbed her nose. “Forget it.”

  “Maybe we should stop and get some coffee.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m fine. Let’s go to San Jose and get this over with. Where’s that goddamned key ring?”

  26

  SAN JOSE

  Lissa looked up at the glass-fronted stairwell of the Creighton Building, an early-seventies office cube on a nondescript frontage road adjoining 280, surrounded by used-car lots. Banners flapped enthusiastically at Choosy Chan’s, just a few dozen yards south, but at six-thirty, with dinner on and dusk falling, there were no customers. A tall, skinny salesman in a tight-fitting herringbone suit lounged against a Ford Explorer, picking his teeth. He ignored us.

  I held the small steel ring with a paper tag on which Rob had neatly printed this address. The ring held three keys, two of the common brass variety that would fit any number of doors, and one steel, new, square, and shiny.

  We pushed open the glass door and entered the lobby. Fluorescent lights came on and made us jump, but it was just a building timer. The makeshift security desk was deserted and dusty. We looked at the list of tenants in a glass case on the wall, columns of white-plastic letters against ribbed black velvet. None of the names suggested Rob.

  “Maybe he moved out,” I said.

  “He would have thrown away the keys,” Lissa said. “He hated old keys.”

  I threw away old keys, too. The first floor was occupied by an investment firm, the third floor by a law firm. That left the second.

  All but one of the twelve doors on the second floor were closed and locked. Most sported engraved Formica plates slipped into cheap aluminum mounts. Beyond the open door, a lone receptionist sat at a cheap desk, talking on the phone. “All right, Mother. I’ll work it out. Let me see,” I heard her say. “That would be four hundred and twenty-six oranges. Right? I’m sorry. Five hundred and two.” She did not look up as we walked past.

  After first checking to make sure the corridor was empty, we tried the brass keys on each of the three doors that had no name plates.

  No go. We paused. Lissa wanted to use the water fountain at the end of the hall, but I suggested that could be a bad idea.

  “How would they know about this place?” she asked. I shook my head.

  “It’s hot,” she complained, but did not drink.

  I scanned the name plates, trying to get in touch with my brother’s sense of humor, his quirkiness. It took me two strolls up and down the hall, and a glance from the receptionist as I passed for the third time, before I stopped in front of a door with a plaque engraved Richard Escher Industries.

  Escher, Richard. Escherichia coli, E. coli, had been discovered by a German named Escherich.

  The second brass key worked, and the door opened. The office was dark. The door bumped halfway through its swing against something heavy. I made out shadowy piles of boxes. A musty smell, something old and spoiled, drifted out with the cool air; not big, not a body, I thought, but mildew or mold. Old magazines or books.

  I was suddenly very reluctant to go in.

  Lissa sneezed. “How did you know it was this one?” she asked as she took a Kleenex from her purse.

  I explained. “Much too obvious,” I concluded under my breath.

  “Obvious to whom?”

  Someone spoke at the end of the hall. We both leaped into the office. I closed the door and fumbled for the light switch. Fluorescents flickered to stark white brilliance over the small lobby and down the hall.

  Lissa let out her breath and laughed. “We’re acting like burglars,” she whispered.

  “Not as long as the rent’s paid up,” I said.

  “It’s been a month and a half,” Lissa said.

  We were just talking to break the quiet. What we saw did not make much sense. Cardboard file boxes lined the wall behind the door. Two had toppled from a corner stack. We stepped over a slide of old issues of Friday, Colliers, Time, and Life magazines.

  I slid open a balky closet door and found heaps of newspapers, a box full of clippings, another box packed with offprints from Web sites.

  “What was he doing?” Lissa asked.

  “Research,” I guessed. I picked up a magazine. Two pages had had clippings removed. Nearly all the magazines in the stacks were from the late 1940s and early ’50s. A few dated back to the ’30s.

  The carpet—what we could see beneath the boxes—was worn and gray.

  “What is that smell?” Lissa asked, and tried to hold in another sneeze. It backed up on her, and she snorked delicately into the Kleenex.

  “Old newspapers,” I guessed.

  “Smells like stale b
eer.”

  We looked into the second room, a small office space about ten feet on each side, and found a folding cot covered by a single wool blanket. Around the cot, books and newspapers filled cheap pine-and-cinder-block shelves, overflowed boxes, or tumbled out of another small closet. The books were paperbacks, mostly, narratives and histories of World Wars I and II, the Russian Revolution. I recognized a few Rob and I had read as kids.

  I spotted three hardcover books by Rudy Banning and pulled them carefully from the middle of a stack. Between Two Devils, a history of the Hitler/Stalin alliance, was labeled NY TIMES BEST-SELLER FOR FIVE WEEKS. It had been published in 1985. The second, We Knew Nothing, compared German civilian complicity in the Holocaust with Russian civilian complicity in the expulsion of Jews to Siberia in the 1950s. Published in 1992, it was not labeled as a best-seller. Each of these was heavily underlined and annotated, with lavender, yellow, and pink highlighting spread across many pages.

  The third, slender and outsized—Blondi, Dog of Destiny—had been published in 1997 by the White Truth Press in Ojai, California. On the title page, in bold fountain-pen strokes, it was signed, “To Rob and any future children—a legacy of fact, sworn to by Rudolph B.”

  I passed Blondi to Lissa, who studied the simple illustrations with a wrinkled brow. “Hitler had a dog?” she asked.

  “I guess so.”

  I placed the valise, never out of my sight, on the floor and piled Banning’s two other books on top, then dug through the closet. A small safe, bolted to the floor, stood open beside accumulations of the San Jose Mercury News.

  My brother had never been a pack rat. He had always traveled light, just like me. This clutter was totally unlike him and pointed to either a hasty and unfinished project or a true change in personality.

  I stooped and looked into the safe. Empty.

  Through the thin walls, I heard the mechanical chuckle of a small compressor turning on—a refrigerator, I guessed. The sound came from the third room, at the end of the hall.

  That room was the largest, about twenty feet long and twelve wide. A small conference table in the center supported at one end a small, cubic white refrigerator. A medical-quality microscope occupied a cleared space at the opposite end. Bottles of chemicals and boxes of lab supplies shared the middle with a loaf of bread and some cheese, a wilted head of lettuce, an open jar of dried yellow mayonnaise, and a package of Oscar Mayer lunch meat. The cheese, bread, and lunch meat had long since been covered by a lush growth of mold.