The driveway turned again, bringing the house fully into view. It was a two-story brick structure, with a shingled roof surmounted by a cupola supporting the weathervane. A columned portico filled out the front, with gallery porches extending around all sides and embellished with elaborate cast-iron grillwork. A sallyport crouched beside the house, its twin doors lowered to conceal any vehicles inside.
Claude braked in front of twin stone walls connected by an iron gate that blocked the driveway. He reached out to press a button on a metal callbox built into the left wall.
It rang four times before he got an answer. A buzz of static was followed by an echoey male voice.
“State your business, please.”
“It’s Claude Sherman. I need to talk to Professor Guillory.”
A pause, then:
“She’s not expecting you, Mr. Sherman.”
“Gotta talk to her, Pierre. Tell her it’s what she’s been waiting for. The package. She’ll see me right now, I think.”
• • •
The grandness of the house always had the same effect on him. He felt woefully out of place, despite having been invited here a handful of times. Before meeting Anne Guillory on his inaugural visit with Abellard, Claude had never been within a hundred yards of such an opulent residence.
The voice from the intercom met him at the front door, housed in a large muscular body. Claude knew the man only as Pierre. He acted like a butler but didn’t dress like one. Pierre appeared to be an ex-bodybuilder trying to pass himself off as a moneyed man of the world: tailored Burberry suit, carefully groomed five o’clock shadow, mirror-shined shoes. Claude had heard Guillory use the term majordomo in reference to the man but had no concept of its meaning. If pressed, he’d wager it meant a combination of handyman, bodyguard, and house stud.
Pierre wordlessly led Claude down an oak-paneled hallway lined with oil portraits. They turned left into another passage that opened up into a large hexagonal conservatory. As he followed the majordomo inside, Claude felt the same surreal swoon he did the first time he entered this unlikely space, feeling as if one step had transported him from a refined southern estate to the Amazonian wilds.
The conservatory seethed with the hothouse pulse of an oversized terrarium. Bamboo furniture spread out across a floor of varnished pine planks. Traditional southern plantings abounded but were overwhelmed by an assortment of lush tropical varieties: palmettos, moth orchids, succulents, and dozens more filled every available nook.
Claude started sweating, as he did every time he found himself here. The thermostat had to be set well above eighty, with a humidifier adding an invisible mist to the air.
“Sit, please,” Pierre said. “You’ll be attended to shortly.”
Claude took the closest bamboo chair as Pierre turned and exited the room. Bereft of any human companionship, he was far from alone. Rows of translucent cases held bustling colonies of insects and lizards, while tall latticed cages housed an aviary of squawking birds. Feathers brighter than neon, beaks capable of chipping plaster, they merged into a kaleidoscopic whirl in Claude’s overheated brain.
The sound of crisp footsteps came from behind him. Turning in the chair, Claude saw her and everything became real again.
“I’m sorry…” he stammered, rising. “Sorry to show up like this. I know the rules.”
“It’s a bit of a surprise,” Anne Guillory said, moving across the planks with a kind of precise fluidity he’d noted before. “But let’s not put too much emphasis on so-called rules, Mr. Sherman. You obviously have something important to discuss.”
“Yes, very important. I wouldn’t bother you otherwise.”
“Of course,” she replied, smoothing her skirt before lowering herself onto a sofa.
She gestured for him to sit and then remained motionless, studying him. Not for the first time, Claude felt like a kind of bug trapped under glass for her inspection. Nothing more than mild curiosity betrayed itself in her gaze as she waited for him to speak.
“First of all,” he began. “There’s a problem…”
Pierre stepped into the room carrying a silver tray. Claude’s mouth snapped shut mid-sentence. He wasn’t about to say what needed saying for an audience of two.
“I thought some sweet tea and king cake might be refreshing,” Guillory said. “Hardly seasonal for the cake, I admit. But it seems almost shameful to limit such a delicacy to Mardi Gras, don’t you agree?”
Pierre offered Claude some iced tea in a crystal glass and set down a plate holding a slice of three-colored cake on the circular table next to his chair. The muscled servant then repeated the procedure for Guillory.
“I said thin slices, Pierre,” she murmured, accepting the plate. She offered a slightly toothy grin for Claude’s benefit.
Pierre gave a small nod and with five steps had once again vanished from sight.
“I’m not hungry,” Claude muttered, wondering how he was going to state his case if he didn’t even feel comfortable maintaining eye contact with his host.
Claude pegged her at mid-forties. He wouldn’t call her beautiful, but she was certainly striking. Her dark hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail. A pair of horn-rimmed glasses sat high on her aquiline nose. A low-wattage erotic current emanated from within, neatly contained by the well-manicured exterior.
“I don’t have what you want,” he ventured. “There’s not gonna be any delivery today.”
“I won’t say I’m not disappointed, but I will admit to not being surprised. If this was a pro forma visit, you certainly wouldn’t be here unaccompanied.”
Claude eased the dryness in his mouth with a sip of tea. It smelled of jasmine and tasted like a summer day in Audobon Park. He wasn’t much of a tea drinker, but he’d never tasted better.
“Things have gotten kind of mixed up. More than you might already know about.”
“This room makes you uncomfortable, doesn’t it?”
Claude gave a noncommittal shake of the head. He hated the conservatory, but giving an honest answer to her question seemed rude.
“It’s really no more than a fancy indoor garden,” she said warmly. “Or a miniature zoo.”
“Look here,” she continued, rising and walking to an oblong glass terrarium. Inside lay a mini ecosystem of grass, dirt, and a few thick branches. Scuttling about were at least fifty insects, all similar in appearance: roughly an inch in length, brown and black bodies, with large forceps extending from their abdomens.
“These little darlings belong to the order Dermaptera. But you might know their more common name. The earwig.”
“Don’t those crawl into your ear while you’re asleep and lay eggs?” Claude asked uneasily.
Guillory’s brows raised with delight.
“Bravo. That’s indeed the legend. Entirely unfounded, of course. The female of the species wouldn’t find an ear canal very accommodating to her needs.”
Guillory retrieved a thin wooden straw from below the terrarium. She gently nudged it under one of the larger insects. Legs and antennae twitching, it climbed up onto the tip.
“Could you hand me that bottle, please?”
She pointed to a small bottle of brown glass resting on a nearby table. Claude placed it in her free hand.
“Watch now,” Anne Guillory said, lowering the straw so that the tip descended toward the rim. The earwig crawled up the straw, away from the bottle.
“You see? She has no interest in entering such a tight darkened space. The human head is the last place this insect would willingly choose to burrow. But, with a little encouragement…”
She titled the straw higher. Unable to fight gravity, the earwig scrambled down and disappeared into the bottle.
Setting aside the straw, Guillory left the bottle’s rim open, uncovered by her fingers.
“Here’s the interesting part. Our little friend is limited by an evolutional fluke. Inside a constricted space, the earwig can’t turn around or move in reverse. There’s plenty of
room for her to escape, but she doesn’t. She’s trapped, by her own genetic deficiency. All she can do is keep trying to move forward. Imagine finding this creature inside your head, unable to free itself, only digging deeper and deeper. Twitching and scraping inside you, nothing you could do to dislodge it. How long would it take before madness took hold, for death to seem preferable? A day? Less? It’s easy to see where that old wives tale derives its power, don’t you think?”
“Uh, yeah,” Claude said, bewildered by the sight of the bug feverishly clawing against the brown glass. “That’s interesting. But we got some serious problems—”
“He doesn’t know you’re here,” Guillory interrupted, setting down the bottle. “Does he?”
“You mean Mr. Abellard?”
“Who else could I possibly mean?”
“I haven’t talked to him. Thought it was best to see you myself. There’s a problem. More than a problem. I need your help.”
Guillory opened her arms slightly as if to communicate any help she could muster was his for the taking.
“It’s the best thing, for everyone. I’m not just thinking about myself. I…”
He couldn’t find the words to continue. Dark circles of sweat were widening beneath his armpits, a trickle descending the back of his neck. He took another sip of tea.
“The delay has been disappointing,” Guillory said, rescuing him from his verbal paralysis. “To put it mildly.”
“Wasn’t our fault. The main supplier, he cut out on us. You know that already. The backup plan had problems. You know that too.”
“I don’t think we need to dwell on your termination from Bon Coeur. As I said at the time, I admired your resourcefulness for devising an alternate delivery source when Dr. Roque’s output proved disappointing. You should have been more careful, but what happened happened.”
Claude almost flinched at the mention of the abortionist’s name, as well as his own embarrassing termination from the ward. But Guillory had a soothing, almost narcotic way of speaking. He couldn’t help but feel lulled into a sense that maybe the situation wasn’t as catastrophically fucked as he’d feared.
“We had to take the girl,” he said, nodding so vigorously that he felt slightly dizzy. “You were right about that. She knows my face from the casino, put two and two together…we had to do it.”
Claude saw Guillory grin slightly, and he felt that he’d been working too hard to convince himself of something. He had somehow lost track of what he’d come here to discuss, every thought that surfaced in his head faded before assuming clarity.
“I can guarantee you,” Guillory said, “he suspects no participation on your part in that enterprise.”
“No shit,” Claude replied, clumsily lifting the glass for another sip. “I’d be fertilizer right now if he did.”
“I spoke to him about it just yesterday.”
“What?”
“Seemed pointless to keep it from him any longer. Frankly, I’m surprised he hadn’t put the pieces together by now. Your employer is not quite the mastermind he fancies himself, I’m afraid.”
Claude still hadn’t recovered from what he just heard. It made absolutely no sense, and the room felt like it was tilting to one side.
“Hold it. You told him we kidnapped her?”
“Calm yourself, Mr. Sherman. As I said, he has no knowledge of your involvement. I left out that little detail.”
“So…but…why’d you tell him?”
“Because the girl’s value as a motivating force has been greatly diminished. And we have your handiwork to thank for that, don’t we?”
The sharpness of those words snapped Claude out of his thickening haze. He remembered his purpose for being here and made one last stab at steering the conversation.
“We’ve got more than a delay to deal with now,” he said, the words tumbling thickly from his tongue. “Our source…no more batches coming from him.”
“Mr. Sherman, you don’t need to be so coy. Roque is dead. That’s what you’re trying to say, isn’t it?”
Claude’s eyes seemed to shift out of focus. The conservatory’s seething jungle atmosphere swam before him. The shriek of a cockatiel a few feet from his head produced an interior flinch, but his muscles were too numbed to move.
“It’s been on the TV virtually nonstop since this morning,” Guillory continued. “What can you expect from those Uptown snobs anyway? The Lower Ninth averages four homicides a week and it hardly merits a headline. Huge tracts of wetlands are raped routinely, nobody seems to notice. But a prominent physician, knifed in his own clinic less than ten blocks from Tulane…well, that’s bound to ruffle a few feathers.”
Feeling a fiery dryness in his throat, Claude reached again for the tea. His fingers brushed against the glass, knocking it to the floor.
Something was wrong. His appendages had hardened like sunbaked blocks of clay, dumb insensate slabs disconnected from his body. Guillory kept speaking to him as if she didn’t notice the total collapse his nervous system was experiencing.
“You did the right thing by coming here,” she said softly. “There was really no other choice, was there?”
Claude tried to nod, but he couldn’t tell if he was moving his head or his entire torso. Not that it mattered. Whatever the tea had been laced with was taking hold of him completely, and he sensed Professor Guillory didn’t really expect an answer to her question.
He knew the tea was drugged or poisoned without fully grasping the ramifications of that fact. From some faraway place, a voice whispered: You knew it was bad before you took the first sip, but you drank it anyway. Why? Because you deserve this.
It occurred to Claude, the thought forming slowly in his mind as if traveling a great distance to get there, that he’d quite possibly been dosed with the same toxin he’d used to subdue the Lavalle woman before carrying her from her home in the middle of the night.
Curare. That’s what had Guillory had called it. The extract from some woody vines that grew in South America. A skeletal-muscle relaxant, Amazonian tribes had used curare to make poison-tipped arrows for centuries, or so she had said when instructing Claude how to soak a rag in the fluid and place it over the sleeping woman’s face.
Guillory had stressed the importance of removing the rag the instant she stopped resisting, as overexposure to curare could produce death by respiratory paralysis. Claude did as instructed. He always did as instructed, and this was his reward?
“I can see you’re struggling to follow me, so I’ll wrap it up with thanks. You proved yourself a useful contractor, until you weren’t.”
Claude couldn’t understand what was being said anymore. The words buzzed in his ear like an electrical fan with a faulty motor. No meaning, no comprehension. A kind of weightless euphoria washed over him. One knee dropped to the red planks below. His unshaven cheek seemed to kiss the floor rather than collide with it.
“Don’t lose heart,” Guillory said, standing a mile above him. Claude was vaguely aware of another gargantuan presence. The burly manservant called Pierre had returned.
The last thought to fully form in Claude’s mind was not comforting. If this was the same toxin used on Lavalle, then it might not kill him. But why slip him a non-lethal dose? If the professor had decided he was no longer needed for making deliveries, what did she think he was needed for?
As if reading his clouded mind, Guillory answered, “There’s still a useful task to which you can be put.”
Claude didn’t like the sound of that. Even as he was sucked deeper toward oblivion, those two words thundered ominously in his head.
Useful task?
Then the last fiber of lucidity dissipated like smoke from an extinguished match, and he knew no more.
25.
Monday and Rusty lay on her bed as afternoon street noises wafted in through the open window. They both directed their attention to the screen of her iPad, propped up against a pillow. The web browser displayed a page on YouTube.
�
�Ready for this?” she asked.
“Let’s see it.”
The video was paused on an arresting image shot in grainy low resolution. A shirtless, hooded man faced the camera. His muscular frame stood poised in front of a large red flag with an insignia depicting a snake coiled around the letter V.
A caption underneath the video screen read: VECTOR Manifesto—Public Access Broadcast, 10/3/2010.
Monday clicked the mouse. The hooded man pointed to the camera and started speaking in the bombastic cadence of a tinpot dictator.
“Citizens of Louisiana, hear the VECTOR Manifesto! We are no longer willing to sit by and watch the Gulf’s most vulnerable ecosystems suffer wanton despoilment at the hands of money-grubbing politicians and their corporate masters. The time for entrusting these natural treasures to the so-called protection of toothless legal threats at state and federal levels is over. The time for war is now!”
The hooded man shook a knuckled fist to drive home his words.
“See where this is going?” Monday murmured.
“Tree huggers gone wild?”
The hooded man paused, switching his gaze to another cue card outside the frame.
“We vow swift, merciless retaliation against the governor and members of the legislature who voted for state measure 2197-A, as well as two private firms whose ready cash pushed the deal through. The wetlands south of Beaux Bridge will not be ripped asunder to make room for another mixed-use eyesore intended to reap maximum profit by forcing grotesque levels of human encroachment onto precious land. VECTOR will not allow this to happen! Our proactive assault will not be delivered with guns or explosives, but by targeted deployment of natural lifeforms serving as transmitters of deadly pathogens.”
“Otherwise known as vectors,” Monday said, pausing the video. “Bugs, rats, anything that carries disease.”
In response to Rusty’s raised brow she added, “I looked it up.”
She started the video again.
“Serving on the front lines of Mother Nature’s army,” the hooded man continued after another cue card switch, “are mosquitos genetically engineered to spread West Nile Virus. We will unleash these and other vectors across an array of strategic locales to wreak widespread havoc on the agents of venality. Nature is indeed red in tooth and claw. The people of this state, and the world, will soon learn that to their horror. VECTOR has spoken!”
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