The Judas Gene (v1.0), page 6
“What do you think, Pete?” Davis’s words startled him.
“Sorry, sir. I wasn’t paying attention.” Juno bit his lip, he rarely got caught at such a disadvantage.
“We were just saying that the Golding murder appears to be evolving into a case of major proportions,” Renée said quickly. “The commissioner has suggested that I follow up on Ben Levi while you concentrate on Golding and Goldstein.”
“That sounds reasonable.” Juno didn’t care if it was or not; this was one time he agreed with his partner’s philosophy that a strategic retreat was sometimes wiser than a poorly formulated attack. “We’re used to dividing up the work without losing track of one another.”
“Fine.” Davis stood up. “I want a daily report of your progress, in person if possible; if not, by phone.” He looked hard at the two detectives. “Something about this case stinks. I don’t like it.” He turned to Mann. “I want you in on all future discussions. I’m convinced that scar is significant. Keep at it. If you come up with anything, call Lieutenant Juno or Sergeant Tracy immediately.”
“Of course. I have already told Lieutenant Juno I will help in any way I can.- In fact, I suggested to him that Mr. Golding’s religion—he was a Jew, you know—may be more important than his profession, especially since the murder weapon was a Luger.”
Davis thought for a moment. "Follow up on that, Pete.”
Juno merely nodded.
The telephone rang. Visibly annoyed by the interruption, Davis answered, frowned, and handed the phone to Juno.
The detective was surprised to hear Joshua Fields’s voice.
“Where have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you for hours!” Fields did not wait for a response. “I have to see you, Peter. As soon as possible.”
Juno could not remember the last time his brother had called him ‘Peter.' There was something ominous in the sound of his own name. “Want to meet someplace, or shall I come to your apartment?”
“No. Meet me at the Presbyterian Emergency Room. Know where it is?”
“Sure. I’ll be right there.”
“Good.” Fields hesitated. “Be careful.”
Frowning, Rolfe Penzel slid down farther on the seat. Despite the lateness of the hour—it was just past seven—the garage beneath the administrative offices of the New York City Police Department was not deserted as he had anticipated. Although the number of people had dwindled since 6:30, one was enough to prevent him from accomplishing his? mission; he knew no excuses would be tolerated by Reichmann.
Suddenly aware of the silence, he sat up halfway and peered over the dashboard. The garage was empty. Still, his uneasiness persisted. Ordinarily he was confident when embarking on an assignment; but that was because he had formulated, studied, revised, and polished his plan of action until no doubt remained that he could carry it out successfully. Reichmann had made it clear to him that this task was urgent. There had been no time for his usual cautious and detailed planning.
The sound of footsteps on the concrete walkway startled him. Reaching for the Luger lying next to him on the seat, he checked the clip to be certain it was full, rechecked the silencer, and released the safety. Without moving, he surveyed the garage, paying special attention to possible routes of escape. Adjusting the rearview mirror, he could see a figure running toward him. Reichmann’s description of the Greek detective had been exceedingly accurate. Penzel smiled as he weighed the gun in his hand and let the trigger rest lightly against the pulp of his index finger. He would not aim and fire until Juno had passed him.
Pressing himself down and back into the seat, he listened as the steps sped by. He sat up cautiously and scanned the garage one more time; except for the rows of parked cars, it still appeared empty. Steadying his wrist on the door, he framed the back of the raincoated man on the top of the sight.
He hesitated. A car had driven down the ramp; he could hear it slowly approaching. Despite the exigency of this mission, Penzel knew that success was rarely achieved by rushing headlong into a situation where the odds were stacked against him: a gun battle in the police department garage would be foolhardy.
He pulled out and headed toward the exit. As he passed the oncoming car, he noted its occupants. “Israelis!” He spat out the word and gritted his teeth; he had seen the two men someplace before.
5
Juno identified himself to the guard at the Emergency Room entrance and was directed to the receptionist, who smiled at his approach and informed him that Dr. Fields would be with him shortly.
The crowded waiting room was filled with a melange of languages and the stale smell of tobacco, liquor, and unwashed bodies. An intern knelt on the floor to examine the tom eyelid of a wailing infant held uncertainly on the lap of a pale, frightened girl who looked too young to be its mother; a nurse in a green scrub dress stood in one comer to apply an Ace bandage to the limp wrist of a lanky, smiling black man; a derelict wrapped in a worn overcoat took sips from a bottle concealed in a wrinkled brown paper bag despite uncontrollable paroxysms of wet cough. It was a depressing scene, and Juno was relieved to see his brother walking quickly toward him down the stretcher-lined corridor; but his concern mounted at the sight of him.
Peter Juno knew his brother well. Joshua Fields was a man of habit. He found a routine that suited him, and he kept to it compulsively unless an emergency forced him to depart from it. Whatever had prompted him to alter his structured existence this evening was grave; that was apparent from the look on his face.
Fields led Juno by the arm into a small room and closed the door. Scrutinizing his brother closely, Juno waited for him to speak. Fields appeared exhausted: his eyes were hollow, his face drawn, and his movements rigid as he settled himself onto the cot on one side of the room and motioned Juno toward the shabby armchair opposite him.
“Intern’s on-call room,” Fields apologized. “Nothing fancy, but we can talk here without being disturbed.”
“You look tired. What’s so damned important that the professor is playing intern?”
“You remember my German cleaning lady—the one you asked about last night?”
“Sure.” Juno laughed. “You didn’t call me all the way down here to tell me she’s got another free day, did you?” The anguish in his brother’s eyes made him regret the remark before he had finished it.
“She’s dead, Peter.”
It was a combination of the statement and that damned “Peter” again. “Sorry, Josh. Really I am.” He u»s sorry, but he wasn’t there to offer sympathy. He knew it and Josh knew it. It was time for the rest of the story, but Josh would have to tell it in his own way.
“I think there are some things you ought to know about Mrs. Schonberg’s death,” Josh said, “especially since you seemed so concerned over that phone call last night.”
“Mrs. Schonberg?”
“My cleaning lady,” Fields said. “I got to know Eva Schonberg fairly well in the year or so she was my housekeeper. On the days she worked, she’d come in about noon and stay till seven or eight. She was a lonesome soul, and I think she purposely worked those hours so she’d be there when I got home and have someone to talk to and fuss over for a few minutes. She always made sure that I had enough to eat and that my shirts were clean. I liked the attention. She was a typical Jewish mother—”
“Jewish? I thought you said she was German.”
“She was. A German Jew. Nothing so surprising about that; there used to be a lot of them. Her husband had been a jeweler— one of the biggest diamond merchants in Germany—until the Nazis came into power. Although he lost everything, he was enough of a figure in the Jewish community to be useful as a puppet administrator in some sort of council that helped manage Jewish affairs—relocations and things like that. The Nazis had one in every big city and town; they were called Judenrate. So he was able to keep himself and his wife relatively safe until 1943, when he raised too much of a fuss about what was happening to the Jews he was relocating. As a result, the Schonbergs were sent to a concentration camp where Mr. Schonberg was exterminated a few months before the war ended. Fortunately, she survived.”
“Which concentration camp?”
Fields thought for a moment. “Dachau.”
Juno barely nodded. “Go on.”
“Like most women her age, she had some medical problems; but she rarely talked about them, and I never asked—it was really none of my business. About a month ago, though, she mentioned that she wasn’t feeling well; but she continued working, and I didn’t think any more about it—until tonight.
“I was on my way out when the Emergency Room paged me. Mrs. Schonberg was there asking for me. When I got there, she was in pretty bad shape.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean she was damned sick! What the hell did you think I meant?” Fields closed his eyes and rubbed his temples with his fingertips. “Sony, but I’ve got a lousy headache.”
Juno reached into his pocket and threw a small tin of aspirin to him. “Take two.” He got up and poured his brother a cup of water from a cooler in the comer and then sat down again. “What I meant was how was she sick? I take it she wasn’t shot or stabbed or beaten, or you’d have told me.”
“I can describe her signs and symptoms to you, I can tell you the mechanism of her death, but I can’t put all of the pieces together.”
“Is that so unusual? After all, you weren’t her regular doctor. You arranged for an autopsy, didn’t you?”
“Of course! And please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not alarmed because I’m stumped and my ego is bruised. All of us, no matter how good, miss diagnoses, make mistakes, and sometimes even kill a patient because of an error in judgment.”
“Then what specifically is bothering you about Mrs. Schonberg?”
“We have the pieces; they don’t fit. A white woman. Sixty-
seven. Past history of being in Dachau. In generally good health since coining to the United States in 1948. For the past month she has had rapidly increasing fatigue; headaches; lapses of memory; intermittent loss of vision, speech, and bladder and bowel control; muscular weakness; loss of sensation; and inability to perform a variety of relatively complicated neurologic functions such as calculations, fine movements of the hands and fingers, and maintenance of balance. Then suddenly one evening it all goes; she ends up with what amounts to no nervous system. She just loses one neurologic function after another faster than we can compensate for the loss; and finally she’s lost more than we can replace with machines or drugs, and she’s dead.”
“Wait a minute.” Juno held up both hands. “I get part of what you’re saying, but not all of it. Mrs. Schonberg had some sort of problem with her nervous system, and whatever it was killed her rather quickly. Right?”
“Right.”
“I gather diseases of the nervous system don’t usually act as rapidly as hers did.” It was in part a statement, in part a question.
“Some do.” Fields enumerated the possibilities. “Acute viral encephalitis, an unusually acute form of multiple sclerosis, an Overwhelming intracerebral bleed or lade of blood, the end stages of certain infiltrating tumors, and damage resulting from excessive exposure to certain poisons and drugs.”
“Well, couldn’t she have had one of those?”
“She could have-^but she didn’t. Besides, even the entities I mentioned don’t involve so much of the nervous system.”
“When you say ‘she didn’t,’ I take it you have proof.”
“Presumptive evidence, not absolute proof. By history, physical examination, the laboratory tests we could get, and from the gross autopsy findings, she did not have any disease I know of that could have caused the clinical picture I saw. We have blood and tissue put aside for more complete analysis and viral studies.”
“You’ve already done the post-mortem examination?”
“Just the gross exam. I thought it was important. It’ll take a couple of days to get the final microscopic evaluation.”
“Did you dear it with the medical examiner’s office?”
“Of course! We know the rules when a patient dies so quickly. Besides, we have a pretty good pathology department.” Fields smiled. “Probably a lot better than yours.”
“No argument. So what did your eminent pathologist find?”
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. But that’s not so uncommon; diseases of the nervous system may result in no gross structural changes, yet there may be significant microscopic alterations. Besides, all we did was examine the surface of the brain, spinal cord, and representative nerves. A more detailed inspection will be done after fixation in formaldehyde. I’m afraid we’ll have to wait for the answer—if there is one.”
“Let me get this straight. You’re worried because of the way in which Mrs. Schonberg died and the fact that there appears to be no readily available explanation for her illness and her death.”
Fields nodded. “But that’s not why I called you. As much as I value your expert opinion on many subjects, medicine isn’t one of them.”
“Then why?”
“Because a couple of things besides Mrs. Schonberg’s death seem too coincidental. And above all—and don’t laugh or accuse me of playing detective—because I think that something terrible is happening.”
Juno stared at his brother. There was no levity in Fields’s voice, no smile on his face; the fear in his eyes conveyed his feelings unmistakably.
“I’m listening.”
“First, the disease is atypical in that it is overwhelming and diffuse and does not fit any of the possibilities I mentioned to you. Second, Mrs. Schonberg was a Jew in a concentration camp during the Hitler regime. I’m not sure whether or not there’s a relationship between her and that man you were so upset about, but you must admit there are similarities in their backgrounds. What I consider to be most significant, however, is something she told me—something that scared the hell out of me.” Fields hesitated. “Mr. Schonberg had the same symptoms in 1945 that she had for the past month. In fact, she was certain he was sent to the gas chamber because he was so sick that he was incapable of working.”
“That was over thirty years ago!”
“That’s just my point … and I questioned her carefully. Despite the fact that she was so sick, I took the most detailed history possible. I wanted whatever she had hidden in her memory about her husband’s illness that might help me treat the disease that was killing her. She wouldn’t change her story; she was adamant about it until the very end: she and her husband had the same illness over thirty years apart!”
“But it’s not possible. … Is it?”
“I’ve been wondering about it for hours. No disease we know of has an incubation period that long. Serum hepatitis, rabies, and monkey B encephalitis may have an incubation period exceeding six months—but not thirty years! There are some diseases that may relapse later. Brill’s disease, also called recrudescent typhus, can recur forty or fifty years after the initial episode; but Mrs. Schonberg never had typhus—I asked her— and the illness that killed her didn’t look anything like typhus. Some diseases, like syphilis, occur in stages; but once again, none of them fit.” He paused. “There are a few slow … But that’s impossible; their existence wasn’t even known then. I suppose it’s possible that she died coincidentally of a disease that her husband had over thirty years ago, but you must admit the odds against that happening would be astronomical.”
Even as a layman, Juno could understand the magnitude of the medical riddle Mrs. Schonberg presented; and as a policeman, he could not deny that there were several factors that linked Morris Golding and Avram Goldstein to Eva Schonberg. But to extrapolate these to a prophecy of an impending disaster and to attempt to relate an event that had occurred in a Nazi concentration camp over thirty years ago to those that had taken place in the past forty-eight hours was almost inconceivable. There was one component, however, that superseded all the rest and made it all seem plausible: Joshua Fields. Juno had the utmost respect for his brother’s knowledge, insight, and ability to put things into their proper perspective. Fields was not an alarmist; he was able to separate the important from the unimportant and to deal with both accordingly; he always had a good reason for what he did. What it might be now alarmed the detective.
“Why did you bring me down here? Couldn’t we have talked at your apartment?”
“I want to show you something.” Fields got up and started out of the room.
Juno followed.
Away from the Emergency Room, the hospital appeared peaceful. The two men walked in silence down long, dimly lit corridors to a set of windowless swinging doors that squeaked discordantly on large brass hinges. Juno barely caught a glimpse of the fading words in worn black paint:
necropsy—authorized
personell only
The room was immaculately clean and excessively bright; the floor and the walls were covered with light tan tile, and the ceiling was made up of recessed lighting panels. Behind a desk in one comer, an elderly man, cigarette dangling from his lip, looked up from his newspaper as they entered.
“Evenin’, Dr. Fields.” He punctuated his greeting with a deep cough.
“Good evening, Lloyd. This is Detective Juno.” Fields nodded toward his brother. ‘Thanks for waiting. We’ll only be a few minutes.”
‘Take as much time as you need. I’ll just open up for you.” Picking up a small ring of keys, he hobbled to a wooden door in the center of the far wall and unlocked it. “Don’t bother signin’ in. I’ll do it for you.” He held the door open for his two visitors and stepped aside to let them enter.
