Killer's Choice, page 7
But who?
I closed the messages and looked carefully at the cobra home page. The huge green snake was slithering. At irregular intervals it rose and looked me straight in the face, ready to strike. Previously, each time it had gone through its contortions, I was too outraged or terrified to pay the home page sufficient attention. Now I saw that there was a dim, or anyway discreet, toolbar at the top of the page, and that it included Home, which is where I was, About Us, Archive, and Contact. If I clicked on Archive, the messages and the video came up. Clicking on About Us elicited as reply:
Access Currently Denied
Let’s go, I whispered to myself and clicked on Contact. The little spinning circle appeared. My laptop was working hard to open whatever lay beyond. After some seconds, a keyboard appeared and above it a box in which a message could be written.
Without stopping to consider, I wrote:
Who are you, Monster? How can I get you off my back?
A message appeared with the speed of a computer-generated reply:
Inquiries will be answered in the order they are received.
VI
I wasn’t going to remain glued to my laptop screen awaiting my turn. That was no doubt what the Monster expected, but I wasn’t in the mood to play along. I glanced at my watch. It was past six. No reason why I couldn’t have a drink. I wanted one badly. But except for my run in the park, shortened by the eruption of the Monster’s thugs, I had had no exercise, and I hadn’t exercised the day before. I called the gym. My trainer, Wolf, hadn’t left for the day and was willing to stay for an hour of Krav Maga if I came right over. I told Feng I was going out and reminded him that he had specifically told me I didn’t need an escort to Third Avenue and back.
Quite right, sir, he answered. Have a good workout.
I was in the mood to mollify Feng, so I said I’d have dinner at home if he could take Satan out for his evening walk and still have time to prepare a simple meal.
Certainly, sir. Spicy cold noodles and lamb Szechuan, if that is all right with you.
It was. I made no recommendation concerning wine. I’d come to think he knew more about that than I.
* * *
—
Wolf thought my reflexes were slow and my timing was way off.
You don’t have your usual level of concentration, he observed.
That was very true. However hard I tried to keep my mind on blocking Wolf’s thrusts and finding an opening to attack him, my thoughts kept returning to my laptop. What new horror would I find when I fired it up? Having made an appointment to practice the next day, and every day thereafter except Sunday, which was Wolf’s day off, I hurried home. Out of habit acquired fending off Abner Brown’s thugs, I looked carefully for a tail. Nobody seemed to be following me, no one in sight whose presence on a quiet side street in my Upper East Side neighborhood seemed at all unusual. At home too everything was orderly and quiet. Feng met me at the door, offered me a glass of orange juice, and reported that his walk with Satan had produced the desired result.
His favorite spot on Madison Avenue, sir. He’s a good dog, with good habits. Shall I bring your martini to the library now?
Thanks, Feng. I want one badly, but I’ll take a bath and dress first.
Very little—perhaps nothing—in human behavior surprised or shocked Feng. He had seen too much. His father, a classical Chinese literature high-school teacher, being beaten to death by his students during the Cultural Revolution before a crowd of spectators that included his mother, his older sister, and himself, all three forced to watch, their arms pinned back; his mother some days later throwing herself out the fourth-story window of their apartment and surviving as a quadriplegic whom his sister and he left behind in a Beijing hospital when they were marched off into the countryside for reeducation; his sister, who had been a good young violinist, seeing her fingers become gnarled and covered with calluses from work in the fields—these were his early memories. His sister, by then married to a toothless peasant fifteen years older than she, an outcome considered politically redeeming for a girl of bourgeois background, was someone else he left behind and never saw again after his own remarkable skill as a wrestler came to the attention of the local party boss and led to his being sent to the military academy in Shanghai. The other side of Feng was his rigor. Absolute rectitude, unflinching courage, and, somewhat comically, a sense of propriety in behavior and dress that I was sure would have enchanted my Boston Brahmin grandmother. Therefore, his asking whether I would like to have my martini in the library while I was still in workout clothes meant simply that he didn’t forget that I was his employer and was free to do as I pleased in my apartment. It didn’t make it any less true that I would have disappointed him if I had said yes: I might in fact have hurt his feelings.
My respect for Feng’s standards aside, the truth is that I wanted my hot bath and wanted to change my clothes, and, in early summer, if I was to keep Feng happy, that implied crisply pressed chinos and a linen blazer. My shirt could be open at the neck. Once the weather turned cool, he would have deplored anything less than a necktie or a turtleneck polo. I passed through my study on the way to my bath. There it was, on my desk, the violated, hacked laptop, my companion in the struggle to tame words and spin my stories, now inhabited by a malign force, the instrument of a deadly enemy. I resisted the temptation to open it. The Monster too could learn to wait. I’d get to him when I was ready.
There was, however, a limit to my self-discipline. I had vaguely thought of not looking at the computer until after dinner, but I couldn’t hold out. Besides, I said to myself, by way of excuse, if I didn’t look I’d be wondering what, if anything, was there and wouldn’t be able to do justice to my martinis or Feng’s lamb. Therefore, as soon as I had dressed, I went resolutely into my study, opened the laptop, and typed in my password. The cobra website came up:
You have a new notification
I clicked on those words and a message appeared:
For once you’ve found the mot juste, Dana. I am indeed a monster. Here is the link to my baby photo album. It will tell you more about suffering and hatred than you wish to know.
Once again, I followed the instructions. The images that appeared were not at all what I had expected—I’m not sure I knew or could describe what I expected. The first series consisted of headshots of an infant, not more than a month or two old, and perhaps younger. I suddenly realized that I had not known any newborn babies or even very young ones. The head was hideously misshaped. One ear was missing. One eye was way off to the side, covered by a flesh fold that was unlike an eyelid. The nose was off-center. I was accustomed to the appearance of malformed mouths from photographs, frequently appearing in ads seeking donations in the Times, of children with split lips and cleft palates. This mouth was similar, except that the images I’d seen before had all been of much older children. Somehow this being a baby’s face made the deformation even more shocking. The headshots were followed by close-ups showing particular aspects of the face from different angles. The distance from the camera varied as well.
The age of the infant was revealed after I had scrolled down to the end of this series. A legend, the style and appearance of which made me believe I had been looking at a hospital record, read: Studies of Baby—the name was blacked out—at age of one month.
I took a deep breath, staggered rather than walked to the kitchen, got my martini from Feng, and made it back to my computer. Having downed a big slog, I scrolled to the next page and began to view the pictorial record of operations done on the child, with brief clinical descriptions and the child’s age.
Ablation of the eye at the side of face and trimming of the flesh fold to prepare for subsequent installation of a glass eye and creation of a simulacrum of an eyelid. Age eighteen months.
A note specified that the eye that was removed was unseeing.
Repositioning and restructuring of the nose. Age twenty-four months.
Breaking and restructuring of the jaw. Age thirty months.
Pre-op and post-op photographs, taken from various angles, some zooming in on an aspect of the description, accompanied each procedure.
Many of these procedures were redone at twenty-four-month intervals. Photos succeeded photos.
On the last page, I came upon something called Medical History, Evaluation, and Comments. It appeared that this child was one of a pair of monoamniotic-monochorionic twins. I looked up these terms and found that the first meant that the twins shared the same amniotic sac in the mother’s uterus and the second that they shared the same placenta. The pediatrician surmised that the pair had suffered from a condition relatively common in such very rare births, TTTS. That, I discovered, means twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome, which in turn means that because they share a placenta they also share blood supply, and the supply can become dangerously unbalanced, leading to deformations such as those exhibited by this particular child and potentially grave medical conditions in the twin who is on the short end of the supply. In the case of the child under study and treatment, those included impaired hearing, epilepsy, and uncontrolled tremor of the left arm and left leg, although it did not seem to include other symptoms that would be indicative of cerebral palsy. The hypothesis as to this child being the “donor twin,” the twin giving its rightful share of the blood to the “recipient twin,” and the adverse effect of receiving too much blood could not be studied because of the report received that the recipient twin had died. By reason of other particular circumstances of the case, it could not be ascertained whether the mother had suffered from chorioamnionitis. An infection, I also learned, of the uterus caused by bacteria traveling upward from the vagina, usually during prolonged labor.
I searched for a date or some indication of the hospital where all this had taken place. There was none.
There was a box at the end of the picture show with a caption: Comments. Without pausing to reflect, I typed:
If this is really you as a baby I lack words to express my sympathy with your suffering, and that of your parents. Forgive me for calling you Monster. I was referring to what seem to be your moral qualities, not what may be your appearance.
I finished typing and clicked on a button labeled Send. At once I was returned to the previous page. A whirling circle appeared, signaling new activity, and, in short, the following appeared:
I note that in addition to all your other defects, Dana, you’re mawkishly sentimental. A quality deplorable in all circumstances, and in yours utterly laughable. Don’t waste your pity on me: you will need every ounce of it for yourself and the Jewish slut.
Feverishly, I answered:
Don’t be so sure of that, Monster. And, by the way, where and why did you pick up such fluent Abnerspeak?
A new message appeared at once:
Goodbye. You’ve been timed out.
I made it to the library—it seemed to me that I was a bit unsteady on my feet—threw myself into an armchair, and eagerly reached for the drink and the stuffed egg offered by Feng, who appeared instantly, as though he’d been following my movements on surveillance cameras. Yet to my knowledge, there were none in the apartment. Was it possible that he had installed them on the sly? I scrutinized the tops of the bookshelves and the ceiling. Nothing. The suspicion was absurd.
* * *
—
Twin brother. Donor twin. Recipient twin. I turned these concepts over in my mind as I worked my way through the dinner Feng placed before me and somewhat more than half of the bottle of Beaune-Villages. It was more than I usually allowed myself, but he’d chosen the wine expertly. It was just right with the spicy lamb. He’d picked it out of the wine merchant’s catalog and suggested that I buy at least three cases. It’s a wine that can be drunk now, and it can also wait, he told me. The wines you inherited from your uncle, sir, will take us through the first few months of next year. Then all that will be left are the very exceptional bottles. I encouraged him to buy the Beaune, and whatever else he thought was appropriate. That was before the Monster made his appearance. Now I wondered whether I needed to worry about replenishing my cellar. Twin brother. Donor twin. Recipient twin. What appeared to be a vendetta pursued by a twin who talked like a clone of Abner—without Abner’s obscenities. A twin—if the medical history the Monster posted wasn’t simply a fake put together to confuse me—but whose twin? The recipient twin, according to the medical history, died. Abner was widely known to be an only child. But suppose that the recipient twin did not die? What if that part of the medical history was wrong, based on misinformation, or had been tampered with? Circumstances that prevented ascertaining whether the twins’ mother had suffered from the disease—whatever its name—that traveled from the vagina to the uterus, and presumably had caused the sepsis in the recipient twin? What kind of circumstances were they? Might that also be misinformation, intentionally offered?
Unlike their son, Abner Brown’s parents were not extraordinarily rich, but the research I’d done when I realized it was he who had commissioned the murder of my uncle Harry showed them to have been solidly well off, their wealth drawn principally from the state-chartered bank in Lubbock the father owned, and ranching. The bank, I supposed, had been sucked up into Abner’s criminal enterprise and was a conduit for drug cartel money. But that came much later. It should be possible, I thought, to comb local birth records, as well as back issues of the local newspapers. It seemed likely that Abner’s birth and any serious illness of Mrs. Brown mère, concerning, as they did, leading citizens, were likely to have been noted in the Lubbock newspaper. And it should be possible to go through the records of the hospital where she gave birth. A delivery of twins would not have taken place at home, even with a midwife and, perhaps, a doctor in attendance.
Logically, this was a job for the FBI. That meant I had to show Edwards the medical history, if it was still accessible on my computer. Instinctively, for reasons I couldn’t immediately define, I preferred to keep this knowledge to myself. Nonsense, I knew perfectly well the reason: it was still my crazy idea that I would deal with the Monster all by myself, in my own way, without anyone’s help, except perhaps Feng’s. Crazy and absurd. I had no right to conceal this information from Edwards, and I had better get used to the fact that there would be no Wild West shoot-out between the Monster and me. I hadn’t even managed to kill Abner. I had only been lucky enough to make suicide his only way out of the corner into which I’d driven him. You don’t get lucky like that twice.
I asked Feng to hold off making my coffee until I’d returned from my study and rushed to see where matters stood on my computer. When I clicked on the file that had displayed the Monster’s medical history, I received in its place a message:
The file you have requested is not available at this time.
That was that. I couldn’t really blame myself for the file’s having disappeared before I had shown it to Edwards. If there were a means of capturing it so that it remained on my laptop, I didn’t know it. I would have to rely on my memory and relay to Edwards as accurately as possible what I had seen. The task should not be too difficult, I told myself. The images and words seemed burned in my memory, as though I had been branded.
I finished the coffee, and when Feng reappeared in the library and asked whether I would like another espresso or a whiskey, I told him that just before dinner I’d received new information from the Monster that I thought might be of the highest importance. Unfortunately, when I checked my laptop again moments ago, the file had disappeared. I would have to report on it in detail to Special Agent Edwards and also to Scott, and I would want him, Feng, to listen in. That was why I was not going to give him an account immediately. It was too late, in my opinion, to call either Edwards or Scott; I’d call them in the morning. Right now, I’d take Satan out for his good-night walk. And I’d certainly want a drink when I came back.
Sir, answered Feng, I know you will not be pleased to hear this, but I truly think you should leave the good-night walk to me. Or please allow me to accompany you. You are in real danger when you walk Satan alone after dark.
I understand, Feng, I said, and I don’t mind your speaking up. Not in the least. But I want to take a walk with the dog. I need to clear my head, and that’s the best way. Don’t worry. I’ll be very careful.
Very well, sir. I’ll get Satan ready.
I went to my bathroom, urinated, and washed my hands. The face in the mirror looking back at me could have been that of a madman. Had I gone mad? Had I really seen the Monster’s beginnings on my laptop screen? Had I put to him the question about Abnerspeak? I shook my head, splashed cold water on my face, and, after I’d dried it, dabbed it with shaving lotion.
Feng and Satan were waiting for me at the front door. He’d put Satan’s yellow slicker on him and, in reply to my questioning look, told me a light drizzle was falling. I thanked him, put on the waterproof jacket he held for me, and rang for the elevator. Emil, the night man who’d been on duty the morning of my encounter in the park with the two thugs, was at the building’s front door. Aha, the night shift had begun. He and Satan were buddies. I handed him the box with treats Feng had put in the pocket of my jacket and said, Emil, you’d better give one or two to your best friend. Mustn’t disappoint him.
The caresses took some minutes. As soon as they were over, I whistled, Satan, come! We crossed Fifth Avenue and headed uptown. There were often runners on that side of the avenue, on their way to the Seventy-Ninth Street entrance or home, having finished their run. Perhaps because of the drizzle, I saw no one other than a dog walker coming toward me, a very large black Rottweiler on his leash, which he held short. As was his custom when another dog approached, Satan stopped and stood absolutely still, taking stock of the situation.
