The Syndrome

by John Case

  And still no reaction from Duran—who, she saw, had begun to tremble. Looking closer, she noticed a thin line of foam curling between his lips.

  “Hey!” she said, stepping back involuntarily, her voice an urgent whisper. Frightened now, she tried to pull him away from the desk, but it was useless. He was immobile, immovable, a six foot column of quavering stone. “C’mon,” she begged. “Let’s go!” But he couldn’t see or hear her—that much was obvious. His eyes were dilated, the irises gone and the pupils black, as if it were midnight in the darkest cellar, rather than midmorning in his own consultation room.

  The tremors were stronger now, a real shaking. And then, to Adrienne’s shock, she saw that he was beginning to bleed, a steady drip that fell from his nostrils to the front of his shirt. She knew what to do—the answering machine was in easy reach—but there was something wrong with her arms and legs. It was almost as if she were in a waking nightmare, paralyzed by the specter of something that, even then, was slouching toward her from the cellar.

  And the blood was coming faster now, a steady drip that fell to the floor and spattered her shoes—so that, instinctively, she jumped back. And by that movement, broke whatever spell had been upon her. With a gasp, she slapped the buttons on the answering machine until the sound stopped.

  “Jesus,” Duran said in a dazed voice. “Look at that.” He was swaying slightly, and staring at the blood on his shirtfront. “I got a nosebleed,” he told her.

  Now it was Adrienne’s turn to shake as she took the telephone from him, and hung it up. Pulling a tissue from the Kleenex box on the desk, she gave it to Duran. “From now on,” she said, “if there are any phone calls or messages—let me handle them.”

  Duran gave her a puzzled look, then turned his face to the ceiling. “Whatever… “ he mumbled, keeping his head back. “Who was that, anyway?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  He shook his head, still facing the ceiling. “No.”

  An idea occurred to her. “Well… let’s just see.” Lifting the handset on the telephone, she dialed *69. Then she grabbed a pen, and began to write on a Post-it, as an electronic voice revealed that: “The last number to call your telephone was 202-234-8484.” Hanging up, she showed the number to Duran, but it didn’t mean anything to him.

  “We can still use your computer,” she told him, sitting down in front of the monitor.

  “What for?” he asked, watching as she double-clicked on the AOL icon.

  “There’s a reverse telephone lookup at anywho dot com. You give them the number, they give you the address.” Duran watched over her shoulder as she filled in the appropriate windows, providing the telephone number and area code that *69 had given her. Together, they watched and waited as the hourglass floated in the center of the monitor.

  Waiting for reply. Transferring document: 1% 2% 3% 26% 49%. Query result. The words Residential listing appeared, and under them the following information:

  Barbera, Hector

  2306 Connecticut Ave.

  Apt. 6-F

  Washington, D.C. 20010

  Adrienne frowned. “Who’s Hector Barbera?” she asked.

  Duran stared at the information for a long moment, then held up a hand, and whispered, “We’re in 6-E.”

  It only took a moment for Adrienne’s eyes to widen. Then Duran picked up the phone and, shaking off her silent objection, dialed the number listed for Barbera. Soon, they could hear it ringing next door—a long, slow trill that came and went. After the sixth ring, Duran replaced the handset in its cradle.

  “No one’s home,” he told her.

  She nodded, suddenly relieved.

  “You know how to pick a lock?” he asked.

  She grimaced in reply.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Duran told her. “Wait here.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Health Club.”

  “What?” She was about to ask him if he was out of his mind, but then, it occurred to her that she already knew the answer to that question. Of course he was: that was the whole point. “Why?”

  But he was gone and, for the moment, she was alone in the apartment. Alone with the refrigerator’s hum, and with the changing light as clouds drifted across the sun. And not just that—there was another sound that she couldn’t quite place, and could barely hear, a low tone. Room noise, she decided. Or something.

  Then Duran was back, carrying a twenty-five-pound dumbbell in his right hand. “Stay with me,” he said.

  “But—”

  He glanced down the hall to make certain it was empty, then strode to the doorway of Apartment 6-F. Standing about three feet from the door, he drew the dumbbell back, then came around like a discus thrower, slamming twenty-five pounds of chromed steel into the door just above the lock, splintering the jamb.

  As the door flew open on its hinges, Duran stepped inside—and what he saw took his breath away. The wall between his apartment and Barbera’s was covered with a gray, wire mesh. In front of the mesh was a long table stacked with electronics equipment: there were oscillators, amplifiers, and receivers, and a cumbersome looking device that reminded Duran of a dental X ray. This last machine was pointed directly at the wall, and was warm to the touch, with a green diode that glowed brightly.

  Glancing around, Duran saw that the apartment was not for living. The wooden floor was bare of rugs, the walls empty. The only furniture was a matte-black Aeron chair and a cantilevered desk lamp with a Halogen bulb. A telephone. And that was it.

  Except for the objects that Adrienne was staring at: two padlocked steamer trunks, side by side in the far corner of the room. Feeling Duran’s gaze, she turned to him, and shivered. “It’s freezing in here.” An so it was.

  “He’s got the air-conditioning on,” Duran told her, crossing the room to her side, dumbbell in hand.

  For a moment, they stood next to one another, gazing at the steamer trunks.

  “I want to go,” Adrienne announced. “I want to go right now.” She tugged at his sleeve, but Duran was unmoving. And then, without a word, he stepped back and swung the dumbbell in an arc, smashing it into the lock on one of the trunks. Adrienne’s knees buckled as he threw open the lid. Reflexively, she laid a hand against the wall for support, and looked away. Silence hung in the air between them. Finally, she asked, “is it… Eddie?”

  Duran didn’t answer at first, just shook his head from side to side, more in wonderment than reply. “I don’t know,” he told her. “But it’s somebody.”

  They left the Towers at a racewalk, uncertain what to do or where to go. Adrienne was convinced they should go to the police, but Duran was skeptical.

  “All right,” he said, playing the devil’s advocate, “so what if we go there? What do we tell them?”

  “About the trunks.”

  “Okay. And then what?”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “I mean, what do you think they’ll do? Do you think they’ll go to the apartment and search it?”

  Adrienne thought about it for a long moment. Finally, she sighed. “No. They’d probably just charge us with breaking and entering.”

  “Right,” Duran told her. “That’s what I think.”

  “Then let’s go to my place,” she said. “At least we can get my car.”

  Once again, he shook his head. “You might as well shoot yourself,” he told her. “There isn’t a chance in the world they aren’t watching it.”

  “But I need stuff,” she said. “I need clothes. Makeup. Things!”

  “Then you’ll have to buy them,” he told her. “Until the police start looking for Bonilla… I don’t think you want to go home.”

  So they took the Metro to National Airport and rented a car, then drove to the Pentagon City mall, where Adrienne bought an overnight bag, some makeup and lingerie, and two dresses from Nordstrom’s. As they left the mall, Duran made a call to 911, saying, “I want to get something on the record—whether you do anything about it or
not is up to you… “ Then he told them, succinctly, exactly what he’d seen in Barbera’s apartment, gave them the address and rang off.

  On the way back to the Comfort Inn, it began to rain, just a few slanting specks against the windshield and then—before Duran could figure out how the wipers worked—an obliterating downpour that had him frantically pushing buttons and moving levers as he peered through the pearlized windshield.

  When he finally located the knob that activated the windshield wipers, he turned to Adrienne and said, “I was thinking…”

  Adrienne kept her eyes on the road. He was a more aggressive driver than she was used to. “About what?”

  “All that electronics stuff.”

  “Unh-huh… “ He didn’t say anything, so she prodded him. “And?”

  “Well, I was thinking—maybe it had something to do with me.”

  She just looked at him.

  While Duran lay on the bed, lost in thought, Adrienne stood in the shower, relishing the hot water pounding down against the back of her neck and shoulders. She was thinking about Bill Fellowes, the intern from Howard University.

  Like most interns, Fellowes spent a lot of his time doing shit work, but he was clearly going places. She’d gotten to know him when he’d been assigned to the Amalgamated case, helping her compile a database for the documents and work product. She remembered feeling guilty. Here was a guy who was law review and all that—and she was spending day in and day out, handing him papers to number and date-stamp. Then she remembered that she was law review, and what she was doing wasn’t any more interesting than what he’d been assigned. On the contrary, they were doing it together.

  But the thing about Fellowes was, he’d assisted on a case in the spring that was actually pretty interesting (compared to the Amalgamated matter). Adrienne didn’t remember the details, but it had something to do with “recovered memory”—at least, she thought it had. In any case, there was an expert witness who’d testified on behalf of the firm’s client. She was certain of that because Bill was a gifted mimic, and she could remember the look on his sunny brown face as he reenacted parts of the trial over tequilas at Chief Ike’s Mambo Room. The doctor had been impressive—very cool and basso profundo.

  She lathered her hair, squeezed her eyes shut and turned her face to the showerhead. She’d get the doctor’s name from Bill. Maybe the doctor would look at Duran and, even if he wouldn’t, he might be able to point her in the right direction—a colleague, or something.

  After a minute or two, she rinsed the soap from her hair, stepped from the shower and wrapped herself in a towel. The bathroom was small and steamy, the mirror a gray cloud. Using a hand towel, she cleared enough of its surface to see herself, then yanked the hotel’s plastic comb through the tangles in her hair. It didn’t do much good. But it was the weekend—and it was all she had.

  Finally, she pulled on her new panty hose and stepped into the navy-blue dress she’d bought. With her earrings in place, she emerged from the bathroom, transformed.

  Duran looked up from the TV, and did a double take. “Hey,” he said, “you look… nice.”

  “Thanks,” she replied, stepping into her shoes. “I’ll be back late, so don’t wait up. On the other hand—don’t get lost, either.”

  “But… where are you going?” he asked, as suspicious as he was concerned.

  “To work.”

  “‘Work’? Are you crazy? We’re in hiding, for Christ’s sake! And it’s Sunday—you can’t go to work.”

  “Got to.”

  Duran snapped off the TV, sat up and looked directly into her eyes. “People are trying to kill you! Whenever that happens, you’re supposed to take a day off.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You have to.”

  “I won’t.”

  “And what if they follow you?” he demanded.

  “From here?”

  He shook his head. “To here. From your office.”

  “They won’t do that. They’d have to watch the office all day, just to see if I show up—and my apartment, too—because, when you think about it, I’m more likely to go there than to the office. Especially on Sunday, so… I’ll be okay. It isn’t like the KGB is after us.”

  Duran fell back on the bed. “How do you know?”

  She smiled. “Very funny.”

  “You won’t change your mind?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Then I want you to call me,” Duran told her, “when you get there, and when you leave. Okay?”

  She agreed.

  The rental car was a metallic-green Dodge Stratus. It had that new car smell in spades, and kept fogging up as Adrienne headed north on Shirley Highway past the Army-Navy Country Club. The rain was lighter now, but the humidity was terrific and there wasn’t anything in the car to clear the windshield. So every half mile or so, she brushed the fingertips of her right hand back and forth across the glass, smearing it.

  Not that it mattered. Her mind was elsewhere. She was thinking that Duran was right about going to work. The safest thing to do would be to stay away for a few days, and call in sick. But she couldn’t do that. Slough wouldn’t understand. And if she tried to explain it—if she told him what had happened—well, that would be even worse. Lawyers at Slough, Hawley did not get shot at. Or, if they did, they did not make partner.

  And, anyway, she wasn’t afraid. On the contrary, she was all tapped out on the fear front, and had been for a very long time.

  The thing about fear was that it was exhausting. She’d known that ever since she was a child. For years she’d lived in a state of almost constant anxiety. After Gram died, there was the fear that there would be no one to take care of her. Then, after a series of foster homes, and interim periods in “care,” there was the fear of getting hit, yelled at, humiliated, ignored, or bullied. Even the social workers scared her, the creepy way they held her hand and asked loaded questions whose significance and consequences she couldn’t guess. That she didn’t know the right answers was clear from the little twitches of disappointment in their eyes, the reflexive smiles, the rephrased questions. Once, she’d overheard them talking about a family’s interest in adopting “the younger child”—her—and she’d been scared to death. For weeks she wouldn’t let Nikki out of her sight, terrified that they’d be separated.

  But those were the acute fears, the ones that rose and fell on an almost daily basis, like the tides. There was another fear, though, that was chronic and unchanging, an adrenal drain fueled by the worry that whatever sanctuary she and Nikki had found, it would soon disappear.

  Not surprising then, that after a while, her capacity for being afraid dwindled toward zero—so that by the time she and Nikki were placed with Deck and Marlena, Adrienne’s demeanor had changed from a condition of alert vigilance to a kind of numbed docility. (The famous “automaton” of Mrs. Dunkirk’s pronouncement.) Years later, while a second-year law student, she’d obtained her files under the Freedom of Information Act. There, she’d read a raft of speculation about what was “wrong with her”: attachment disorder, borderline personality, lack of affect. The diagnosis changed from caseworker to caseworker. But the truth was, she was none of those things: what was “wrong” with her was simple. She had combat fatigue.

  Turning off M Street, she headed downhill toward the river, and swung left in the direction of Harbor Place. Georgetown had an abandoned, rainy day feeling to it. Cruising slowly along K Street, she studied the parked cars that she passed. But there was nothing unusual about any of them. So she parked on the street, avoiding the underground garage, which charged twelve dollars for the first three hours.

  It was only a block to the office but, even so, she was wet when she got there. Stopping in the ladies’ room, she blotted her dripping hair with paper towels. Her dress was more than damp, as well, but there was nothing she could do about it—and, anyway, the color hid the rain.

  She passed Bette’s cubicle, and saw that she was hard at wor
k, clacking away at the keyboard, printer humming, talking on the phone. Adrienne tapped the door as she walked by and Bette turned and raised a hand in greeting, eyebrows up and mouthing a silent “Hi!”

  Adrienne hung up her jacket, then sat down at the desk, and pressed the space bar on her keyboard. While she waited for the icons to appear on her monitor, she pulled open the top file drawer—where she kept an electric kettle and a jar of instant coffee for emergencies. Going to the water fountain to fill the kettle, she found Bette waiting for her when she got back.

  “Where were you, Scout?”

  “What do you mean?” Adrienne asked, plugging in the kettle.

  “Yesterday! Dream team’s here, poring over the wonders of asphalt curing times and you were—what? You took off for lunch, and… now it’s Sunday? What happened?”

  She thought about what to say, and what not to say. It was tricky and awful, all at once, because she couldn’t really tell Bette about Bonilla and Duran—or she’d seem like a lunatic. But she couldn’t lie about it, either, because the truth would eventually come out. It had to. She wanted it to. Until then… “Things are real complicated, right now.”

  Bette’s jaw dropped.

  “You want some coffee?” Adrienne asked.

  Bette blinked, milking the moment. Finally, she said, “Okaaaaay… so, when did Slough get you?”

  Adrienne levered two paper cups off the stack, separated them, and spooned out the shiny crystals of coffee. “‘Get me’?”

  Bette blanched. “You mean—you haven’t talked to him yet? Oh my God. You haven’t been home?”

  Adrienne frowned. “Not exactly.”

  “Well, I hope he was worth it,” Bette said, “whoever he was, because… you didn’t even check your messages?”

  Adrienne shook her head for the second time.

  Bette raised her eyes to the ceiling, and sighed. “Well, he left, we left—a lot of messages for you.”