The Immortalist

by Scott Britz

  “You greedy son of a bitch! Are you shaking me down?”

  “I’ve had expenses. It took boots on the ground in Atlanta to get this stuff. It cost me quite a bundle.”

  “Are you telling me you know more?”

  Steadying the tea mug with his left hand, Loscalzo sat down on the edge of the desk and took a yellow envelope from an inner pocket of his jacket. “In here.” He waved it in the air.

  “Give it to me.”

  As Niedermann reached for the envelope, Loscalzo jerked it out of reach and smiled. “This is the five-star premium version, Mr. N.”

  Niedermann felt his blood boil. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding.” He checked himself when he saw the sadistic twinkle in Loscalzo’s eyes. Loscalzo wanted to see him get mad. Why play his game? “All right, you win,” Niedermann said, as calmly as he could. “If you really have something there, I’ll pay the same as I paid for Senator Libby and Roy Mancus.”

  Loscalzo smiled coyly and took another sip of tea.

  “All right, double,” said Niedermann. “But it better be fucking good.”

  “Oh, it’s good.”

  Swearing under his breath, Niedermann got up and opened a door to the console cabinet behind his desk, exposing a Coolidge-era, steel Cary safe. He squatted down in front of it.

  Loscalzo cleared his throat. “Actually, I was thinking in terms of goods rather than cash.”

  “Goods? What are you talking about?” Niedermann’s right hand was poised to dial the combination.

  “You remember my mama? She’s got multiple sclerosis real bad. I hear that Methuselah Vector might help her out.”

  “Sign her up for the Lottery,” said Niedermann, vexed. He quickly dialed the combination, and the door of the safe popped open. Inside, stacked neatly alongside some small portfolios of papers, were twenty or so half-inch-thick packets of $100 bills.

  “She’d never make it into the city. I was thinking of some other arrangement.”

  Niedermann grabbed four packets of bills and stood up. “Forget about it. The FDA is looking over our shoulders every minute with this Lottery. We’re not allowed to play favorites.”

  “Don’t try shittin’ me, Mr. N.” Loscalzo’s tone grew threatening. “I know why you’ve had me doin’ research on all these big shots. You’ve got a special stash hid away somewhere, cuttin’ a few deals on the side. The FDA don’t know about it, but I know.”

  Niedermann glowered at Loscalzo. “Everything is spoken for. I don’t have anything left.”

  “Then get some.” Loscalzo pocketed the yellow envelope. “I’ll come back when you do.”

  Niedermann tossed the money back into the safe and slammed it shut. “You son of a bitch. This isn’t the way we do business.”

  Loscalzo nonchalantly picked up his mug and took a sip. “Why is this woman so important to you, anyway?”

  “She’s someone that needs to be taught her place.”

  “I know she’s got you by the balls somehow. It has somethin’ to do with the Methuselah Vector.”

  “Really? And what makes you so sure of that?”

  “The news has been wall-to-wall. That’s gotta be the main thing on your plate. Plus . . . well, I’ve read what’s in this envelope.”

  The envelope! Loscalzo never bluffed when it came to information. Niedermann absolutely had to see it. “All right. If you have what I need in there, I’ll find you a dose. Mind you, I don’t keep it in this office. I need time to get it.” Of course he knew that all of the Vector stock was spoken for. He wasn’t about to double-cross people such as Red Armbruster or the governor of California. Normally he’d have just told Loscalzo to go fuck himself and come back when he was ready to make a deal. But there wasn’t time now.

  “Tomorrow?” asked Loscalzo.

  “Okay.” Niedermann figured that by then he could buy off Loscalzo with cash. “I need to see what’s in that envelope first.”

  Loscalzo tossed the envelope. It was thick. When Niedermann opened it, he found a dozen sheets of paper folded into thirds. There were e-mail transcripts—including one that Cricket had sent to the CDC that very night—some pages from a personnel file, and a confidential medical report.

  As Niedermann pored over the documents, Loscalzo swung his leg from the edge of the desk and went on sipping his tea. “I haven’t been the greatest son to my ma, if you know what I mean. My brother Frankie was always the good one. But this . . . this could make up for a lot.”

  The words on the pages began to sink in. Niedermann couldn’t resist a grin. Leave it to Loscalzo. He had an animal instinct for the weak spot.

  “Can you get video of this?”

  Loscalzo nodded. “Good, huh?”

  “You’ve outdone yourself, Dom.” Niedermann couldn’t resist smiling, particularly when his glance fell on his cell phone lying atop the desk. That ballbuster Eden wanted a showdown, did he? He’d soon see whose fucking career was really on the line. Wheels turned in Niedermann’s brain. Gifford. The Methuselah Vector. The proxy. The new walnut-paneled office that would be waiting for him on the hundredth floor on the Magnificent Mile. More money than a man could count if he lived a thousand years. In an instant he had forgotten the gloom that had almost swept him away minutes before. He positively couldn’t wait to get to New York.

  Almost. Almost ready to roll. Just one thing first—

  A little payback for Dr. Sandra Rensselaer-Wright.

  Nine

  IT’S PAST MIDNIGHT, HANK.” CRICKET SLOUCHED back on the sofa and rubbed her feet. Each time her thoughts drifted back to Yolanda on the cold steel autopsy table, she would press so hard on her sore arches that they hurt even worse. “Emmy should be home.”

  “She’s saying good-bye to her friends, hon,” said Hank from the kitchen. “Give her a little slack.”

  “She’s going to run. I’m sure of it.”

  “Not without her clothes. You know she was over at the Freibergs’ until after ten, helping to explain to Bonnie and Chuck what happened to their mother. Erich says Emmy couldn’t have been sweeter. She wouldn’t leave the house until both of the kids had dropped off to sleep.”

  “Sweet Emmy? That’s a side I haven’t seen in years.” Cricket glanced at her phone on the coffee table, but saw no voice-mail alerts. “She won’t answer her cell phone. What’s she have one for if she won’t pick it up?”

  Hank chuckled. “Well, it’s not so her parents can check up on her, that’s for sure. C’mon, Cricket.”

  Hank came out of the kitchen carrying a tray with a teapot, a bottle of sherry, and two mismatched cups. The tray looked almost miniature in his strong arms. Sitting down on the love seat beside her, he picked up the sherry and turned the label toward her. “I found this old bottle of Tio Pepe in the cupboard. Your favorite, right?”

  Dust was all over the bottle. “This has been here for five years?” she asked, amazed that he hadn’t drunk it.

  “It’s yours. Part of me must’ve hoped you’d come back for it one day.”

  She was wary of relaxing with him too much. “You go ahead. I’ll stick with tea.”

  “The tea’s mine. I’m back on the wagon.”

  Hank picked up the teapot with an old, quilted potholder and poured steaming brown liquid into both their cups. Cricket was glad to see him off the booze. But then, he’d quit a hundred times, hadn’t he? How long would it last?

  Hank slurped a little of the tea. “Why don’t you lighten up on Emmy? You’ve got to stick around while you wait for the tests on Yolanda—right? Use the time to get to know your daughter.”

  “Maybe you’re right.” Cricket sighed. “I am a headstrong little shit, aren’t I?”

  Hank chuckled, gulped a mouthful of tea too hot to drink, and had to fight to keep from spitting it out. A minor coughing fit ensued. “No comment,” he managed to gasp. “Look
, maybe it’s none of my business, but why now, Cricket?”

  “Making up for lost time.” She said as she twisted her teacup back and forth on the tray. “I fucked up my life, Hank. I was so busy saving the world, I never thought about the people who counted. Or who needed me.”

  “No, it’s yourself you never thought about. I’ve never met anyone more selfless and generous than you. That’s why I fell in love with you. But you know what? I think your father did a number on you. You did every damn thing you could to please him. When he died, instead of being set free, you went into overdrive. You’ve been trying to win approval from a ghost ever since.”

  “Daddy was a world-class scientist. Was it wrong for me to want to be like him?”

  “Not if that’s what you really want. Is it?”

  “No.” Cricket stood up so abruptly that her shin knocked against the coffee table and set the sherry bottle rocking. “Not anymore,” she said as she paced toward the fireplace. “If you want to know the truth, Hank, I’m finished. I’m a total fucking basket case.”

  “You mean the panic attacks?”

  “It goes way beyond that. I might as well be dead. I get up wishing I was dead, every goddamn day. My career is ruined—I haven’t completed any fieldwork in a year. I haven’t written any papers. No one in his right mind will do a project with me. CDC won’t keep me on much longer. Not after last week.”

  “It was Africa that did this to you? That business with Étienne?”

  “Yeah.” Cricket saw her reflection in the mirror above the fireplace. Her eyes were like burned-out coals.

  Hank set down his teacup. “You need time, Cricket. Give yourself a chance to grieve.”

  “Grieve?” The very word seemed to mock her. “I’m not grieving over Étienne. I don’t deserve to grieve over him.” As she spoke, she dug her nails into the mantel. “I killed him.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “Don’t fucking patronize me. Yes, I killed him. I—me—the indomitable Sandra Rensselaer-Wright, daughter of the legendary scientist Edwin Grant Rensselaer. I killed him.”

  “From what I heard, ebola killed him.”

  Cricket turned toward Hank with a blistering stare. “And who the fuck gave him ebola?”

  As if he hadn’t heard her, Hank poured her tea back into the teapot, opened the bottle of sherry, and let it flow gurgling into her cup. He extended the cup to her. “Sit.”

  She could have slapped him. He seemed deaf to her feelings, too stupid to know the weight of the cross she carried.

  But her knees were shaking. She hobbled back to the love seat and sat down, keeping distance between them. Taking the cup out of his hand, she drank. As the warmth of the sherry spread into her stomach, her anger seemed to ebb.

  “It was June of last year,” she said in a monotone—astonished to hear herself speaking, as if the drink had switched on an automatic recording inside her. “Étienne and I were going from village to village in the Congo on a project funded by WHO. There was an outbreak of something called Chi-Chi fever, which I was trying to prove was a human form of Newcastle disease, a chicken virus.

  “Guerrilla wars are always breaking out over there. We heard the militias were setting up roadblocks, and Étienne was all for turning back. But not me. I’d heard a rumor of a family in the mountains that had Chi-Chi—a grandfather, a daughter, and a granddaughter. If it was true, it would have been the first proven case of human-to-­human transmission. I had to check it out. And that was my first mistake.”

  “Why was that a mistake?” Hank poured another cup of sherry. “It sounds like the Cricket I know.”

  “Yes, it was.” Cricket reached for the teacup but paused with her hand just above it. “We never made it. The militia caught us. But once they saw we were doctors, they didn’t harm us. They begged for help. Their leader said his village had come down with a ‘very, very bad sickness.’ Nosebleeds and black stools—it sounded like an outbreak of Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, a tick-borne disease not uncommon in that area. I agreed to do what I could.”

  Cricket picked up the cup, knocked her head back, and swallowed half of it in a gulp. “That was my second mistake. There was precious little I could have accomplished. But I was sure I could figure out something once I got there. I never hesitated.”

  “Again, I don’t see the mistake. Doesn’t your Hippocratic oath oblige you to help?”

  Cricket shook her head. “Maybe I had a right to gamble with my own life. But not with someone else’s. Tien didn’t want to go. ‘I’ll be fine,’ I said, ‘Go back to Kisangani.’ But I should’ve known Tien would never abandon me. He was a romantic—a lot like you, Hank.”

  “Is that what I am? A romantic?”

  “Chivalrous as hell.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

  “In Africa, the very worst. What we found in the village wasn’t Crimean-Congo, but ebola. It was an unusually virulent strain. Of two hundred people in the village, a third were dead, a third were dying, and the rest were wandering about in shock.

  “There’s no cure for ebola. You can give transfusions, IV fluids, and oxygen. With that, maybe one patient in ten will survive. But we didn’t have enough medical supplies even for that. All we could do was separate the living from the dead. Ebola will burn itself out if you deprive it of new victims. So we moved the sick to a chapel on a hillside far from the river. The healthy were ordered to camp in a bean field a quarter mile away. And then we set fire to the village.

  “The concept was simple. The execution was hard. Homes had to be destroyed. Loved ones separated. It was medicine accompanied by tears and screams and pleas for pity. Nothing worse—except ebola itself.”

  Cricket emptied her teacup to the dregs, her eyes contemplatively closed. She set the cup back down, but without letting go of it. “I was making a last check of the village. In one of the huts, I found a young woman hiding, clutching her six-month-old son. The mother was dying, the baby still in the pink of health. ‘Let me save the baby,’ I said. ‘If you love him, give him to me.’ But the mother just hugged him closer.

  “There wasn’t time to argue. Already, the smoke of the burning huts was in the air. And then I made my third mistake—the worst of all. I tore the baby from his mother’s arms. The woman lunged from her bed. She yanked at my face mask. She kicked and scratched and tore my blouse. I had the baby, I couldn’t fight back. All I could do was shout for help.

  “Tien heard me and came running. He pushed between us, trying to hold the mother back. She went at him, spitting, slapping, punching, and . . .” Cricket fell silent. She hung her head as she fixed her gaze on a picture in her mind.

  “And what?”

  “Biting!” Cricket’s voice, hoarse and tremulous, was punctuated by the crash of her teacup against the brick fireplace. “The bite of ebola . . . She’d nipped him on the neck, just below the earlobe. He showed it to me the next morning. A little horseshoe-shaped mark. The bleeding stopped in five minutes. But that was all it took.

  “By dinnertime the next day, Tien complained of a backache; then weariness; then chills. By nine p.m., even four blankets couldn’t keep him warm. By midnight, he was vomiting blood.

  “His only hope was to get to a hospital. So, while everyone else slept, I put Tien in the back of the Wrangler and took off for Kisangani. I was abandoning the village and the people who needed me there. But . . . it was Tien.

  “Kisangani was four hours away. I got there around dawn. Too late. They gave him oxygen, platelets, interferon alpha. They replaced his leaking blood with transfusions. None of it helped.

  “His legs and arms were like sausages. His skin was stretched to splitting. His breathing was fitful, the way it comes just before the end. ‘Forgive me,’ I pleaded. I knew he couldn’t answer. But his silence was unbearable, like an accusation.

  “Then .
. .” Cricket spread her fingers and pressed them against the cocktail table, as if trying to push it away. She looked into the distance. “Through the plastic of his isolation tent I saw him cry tears of blood. Maybe not real tears at all—maybe it was just fluids that got pushed out of the corners of his eyes in his last moment of struggle. But when I saw it, I screamed. I screamed again and went on screaming until the orderlies dragged me to a small, locked room to quiet me with injections. The injections stopped the screaming, but not the memory.”

  Cricket lifted her hands to her face and sobbed. “I went crazy after that. I shaved my head. I tried to quit my job twice. I even mailed my medical diploma back to Harvard, saying I wasn’t worthy of it. Last week I was supposed to give a speech on AIDS prevention in Mozambique. When I looked out into the audience, I was back in that village again. ‘Ebola! Ebola!’ I screamed. ‘Left side for the living, right side for the dead! Burn everything! Save the children!’ You would have thought I was insane. I was insane. A fucking embarrassment to CDC. And here I am, right off the first plane back to the States.”

  Cricket got up and went to the fireplace. She looked at the floor for a long time, nudging the shards of the broken teacup with her toes. “So there you have it. My career’s gone up in smoke. You have the last laugh, Hank. I used to look down on you because you didn’t have fire in your belly. Family was all that mattered to you. Friends. That outrageously expensive boat of yours. Well, you still have all of that. I have nothing. I had to lose it all to see what it was worth.”

  “I have problems, too, Cricket.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Cricket sighed. “I’m one of them, aren’t I? Taking Emmy from you.”

  “Well, since you brought it up—”

  “Try to understand. She’s the only thing I have left. My other fuckups are beyond redemption. But with Emmy—there could still be a chance. She’s young. She needs a mother. I want to try to be that for her. Loving her could give me a reason to go on living. I’m just afraid that I might fail. I’ve failed at everything else.”

  “Love isn’t about success or failure. It’s just love.”