“There’s all these things happening and they never tell us anything!”
Mrs. Zecker’s memory of recent days was not good. Her memory of her earlier years was very good. “I grew up in this house,” she said. “It was nice before the city went to hell. On New Year’s Eve, Papa and Mama, they’d take us up to the attic.” She pointed to the ceiling. “Papa would open the window up there. It was so cold. We’d have blankets around us.”
“About your daughter, Penny—”
“You could smell the smoke from the freighters coming in the window. On New Year’s Eve you’d hear the sailors singing on the ships. Right at midnight, Papa would hold up his hand and he’d say, ‘Quiet! Listen!’ And we’d be quiet. And we’d listen. And it would start. Over there….”
Austen followed her gaze, to where the silver-gray towers of Manhattan seemed to float in the distance.
“It was a roar like the wind,” she said. “It went on and on.” It was the sound of Manhattan on New Year’s Eve. “I don’t hear it anymore.”
Austen sat down on a chair next to her. She touched Mrs. Zecker’s hand. “Can you remember? Did Penny go anywhere, do anything unusual? Anything you can remember?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know…”
“Where did she buy the things for the shop?” Austen asked.
“All over. I don’t know. She always paid the taxes. Once she went to Atlantic City. That was a bus tour…. My Penny is gone.”
“Do you mind if I look at the shop?”
“I can’t go with you.”
“That’s all right.”
Mrs. Zecker pulled a handle on the side of her lounge chair. The back came forward, raising her up. She put her feet on the floor and grunted. Austen took her by the hands and helped her up, and she shuffled across the room, her slippers dragging. She picked up a coffee cup from a bookshelf, and tipped it over. A key fell out.
Austen went down the stairs, out to the sidewalk, and let herself in through the front door of Island Antiques. She switched on a fluorescent light. It was chilly in the room; the heat was off. The walls were painted lemon yellow, and there was dingy lace trimming around a plate-glass window. A number of glass cases and cabinets displayed cheap-looking “antiques.” It was really a thrift shop. There was a rack of musty women’s dresses, and a metal desk with the dried remains of a sandwich sitting on a piece of waxed paper. Next to it was a glass ashtray full of cigarette butts. Penny Zecker had been a heavy smoker. There were bookshelves holding forgotten paperback best-sellers. There was an oak display case with items of costume jewelry in it. On the display case was a sign: “Case not for sale. Don’t even ask.” There was a caned rocking chair selling for seventy-five dollars, which seemed a high price, and a scuffed chest made of stained pine selling for forty-five dollars. She opened the chest. Inside was a stack of National Geographics.
This was looking good. Somewhere in this room was a clue. Penny Zecker was a packrat. Like Kate Moran. There was a similarity in their behavior. And they are now dead.
She began making photographs with her electronic camera.
Austen went through the room carefully. There were trays and boxes of kitchen tools. A meat grinder. There were children’s toys made of plastic, and a veneered coffee table for sale. A nice-looking brass ship’s lamp, for thirty dollars. A Sylvester the Cat jelly-jar drinking glass. A chrome samovar, a lobster buoy. On the walls there were reproductions of snow scenes in frames, everything for sale.
Something was nagging at her. She opened the desk drawer. There were some file folders. She pulled them out, and found a folder marked “Profits.” In it was a list, handwritten, on lined paper. The list was Penny’s way of keeping track of her costs and profits as she bought and sold junk.
There were dates on the sheet, and names. Austen scanned the sheet quickly: “4/18—small chair—$59 cost $5.” It looked as if Penny had bought a chair for five dollars and had sold it to someone for fifty-nine dollars. Penny Zecker was no fool. She had been keeping herself and her mother alive with her business.
Penny seemed a little obsessive about the entries, but this was her means of survival.
4/18—6 Ave. flea—black dress—woman—$32 cost $0 found garbg.
4/18—sharp bone knife—Mr. ? Clow—$18 cost $1
4/19—6 Ave. flea—box (joke)—$6 traded for postcards
4/19—jewel pin (green)—$22 bot $5
She photographed the page.
Austen said good-bye to Mrs. Zecker and promised to let her know immediately if anything further was learned about the cause of the death of her daughter.
Back on the ferry she stood at the rear deck, in the open air, looking over Bayonne and down the throat of the Kill Van Kull. Then she walked to the bow of the boat, and watched the stone crystals of Wall Street approach. The clouds were beginning to break apart, revealing a brownish blue on the face of the sky over the city. The city was looking sick, but there was no diagnosis.
She decided to call Walter Mellis at the C.D.C. In the ship’s passenger cabin she took out her cell phone and punched up Mellis’s home number. The phone beeped at her. The battery had drained.
“Damn,” she whispered.
Feeling more alone than ever, out of contact with the C.D.C., she put the phone in her knapsack and leaned back in her seat. She was exhausted. The ferry ride took almost half an hour, giving her time to think. Austen felt that somewhere in her data there existed a hidden door. If and when she found it, it would lead into a maze of biological systems and relationships, to the inner workings of nature as it played out its billion-year games with the human species.
She opened her laptop computer and started it up. By now she had three memory cards full of images taken with the electronic camera. She slid the memory cards into the computer, one by one, reviewing all the photographs on the computer screen.
Two of the four cases had been people who collect things, namely Kate Moran and Penny Zecker. What about Harmonica Man? He had been a collector, too. He had collected money in his cup, money that had passed through many hands. She didn’t know much about Lem.
Hitting keys on her laptop computer, she brought up the images of Kate Moran’s art collection. Some were close-ups. There was a geode of crystals, she remembered that. Austen hit a key on her laptop and zoomed the image until it was a checkerboard of pixels. She couldn’t see anything. Rocks didn’t carry diseases. She zoomed on the image of the box that held the little beetle with the green eyes. No. The image of the dollhouse. Anything unusual in it? She zoomed images of the boxes Kate had collected. A tin box. What was inside it?
She had not taken any photographs of Harmonica Man’s things. She and Kly had been in a hurry to get out of the tunnel.
The ledger. Zecker’s ledger. She called up the images, and studied the pages. Something caught her eye, something brushed her memory:
6 Ave. flea—black dress—woman—$32 cost $0 found garbg.
It was perhaps the kind of dress Kate had liked to wear. But something else got her attention now: Sixth Avenue. Kate’s father had mentioned that Kate had bought things at the flea markets, and Austen was pretty sure she remembered him mentioning Sixth Avenue. Kate had bought dresses? Her eye went down the ledger:
4/19—6 Ave. flea—box (joke)—$6 traded for postcards
Kate had liked boxes.
Austen felt a chill. What in the hell…?
She reviewed the photographs of Kate’s bedroom again, one by one, on the screen of her laptop.
Then she found it. A little gray wooden box. It was sitting beside the dollhouse. It was small, rectangular, nondescript. Except for one thing. It had a shape painted on the side. The shape was familiar. It was a polygon, an angular, crystalline shape. She had seen it before.
She blew the image up. Blew it up until it was a maze of pixels. She stared at the painted design on the box. Where have I seen this?
It was the shape of the crystals that she had seen inside Kate Moran’s brain. The diagnosis clicked
, like a mechanism locking into place.
Kate bought that box from Penny Zecker, at a flea market.
The box was the pump handle. She thought: It’s sitting in Kate’s bedroom now.
Whirlwind
SATURDAY MORNING
BRAIN VIRUSES can act fast. A brain virus can take a person from apparent good health to a fatal coma in a matter of hours. Viral agents that grow in the central nervous system spread along nerve cells. You can go to bed healthy and never wake up. By the next morning the agent has amplified itself along the fibers of the central nervous system.
The virus had spent the night amplifying in Peter Talides. His mental state was not good. It was Saturday morning, not a school morning, but he got himself dressed for school and walked to the elevated train station. He took the inbound N train to Manhattan, heading for the Mater School. He rode near the middle of the train, as was his habit. The train clattered over the elevated tracks through Queens, went around a bend, and descended into the tunnels under the East River.
He usually changed trains at the Fifty-ninth Street stop, and from there he would take the Lexington Avenue line uptown. At the Fifty-ninth Street station, he got off the train, as usual. The Lexington Avenue line runs at a lower level, and he walked down a flight of stairs to the mezzanine. The mezzanine is covered with colored mosaics. It is easy to become disoriented there. All the exit doors look alike. The mosaics are of trees and greenery. The tree trunks are red and the leaves are green. On the walls are lines of the poetry of Delmore Schwartz and Gwendolyn Brooks.
Peter Talides should have headed for the door that leads to the uptown train. But he didn’t. He failed to read the signs. The colored mosaics disoriented him. He kept going. He passed by words on the wall that said, “Conduct your blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind.”
He passed through a doorway around which shone a huge yellow sun of mosaic tiles. He went down a set of stairs to the downtown side of the Lexington Avenue tracks. A train came along; he stepped aboard. He sat down on a seat, and he was carried away from the Mater School, away from his destination. He sat with his head down almost between his knees. He kept touching his hands to his mouth. His nose was running profusely with clear mucus.
The train carried him along southward, through Manhattan. It dove under the East River and emerged in Brooklyn. At the Borough Hall station in downtown Brooklyn, he seemed to realize he was lost. “I missed it,” he said in a thick voice.
He got off the train. He went up the stairs and down to the other side, looking at the signs. The higher Peter Talides was reading the signs while the lower Peter Talides was screaming in agony and writhing with disease. His midbrain was dying. He sat down on a bench and bent over and put his head between his knees and stayed that way for a long time. He groaned. Eventually a transit officer named James Lindle arrived at the scene. He touched Talides on the shoulder.
Talides uttered a sharp cry, almost like a baby’s cry. It was a startle seizure: a seizure triggered by an intrusion into his world. He fell off the bench to the platform. He curled up on his side and straightened out, his body rigid. The rigidity passed.
A few people stopped and gathered around Peter Talides, but others passed by.
“Stand back, please. Don’t touch him,” Officer Lindle said. He called on his radio for an emergency medical squad from the New York Fire Department.
Talides was near the yellow line at the edge of the platform. Suddenly he twisted and rolled off the platform, dropping five feet down to the tracks. He landed with a splash in pools of water in the track bed.
At that moment, the station filled with the rumble of an approaching train.
“Aw, no!” Officer Lindle shouted. He ran up along the platform, waving at the train. “Stop!”
People were shouting at the man on the tracks: “Stand up! Get up!”
Talides seemed to hear the people calling to him. His eyes were half open. He was lying in pools of water. He rolled over onto his belly and began to crawl across the tracks—away from help, toward the third rail, the power rail. The train was approaching fast.
The train motorman saw the man crawling on the tracks and dumped his airbrakes on full emergency stop. A subway train can slide five hundred feet along the rails during an emergency stop.
Down on the tracks, a tremor shook Talides, and he flopped over and writhed. His clothing was soaked with water. His body crossed the running rail, and his head wedged itself against the electrified third rail. He grounded the electrical system through his head.
There was a sizzling flash. His body snapped rigid, made rock-hard by ten thousand amps of D.C. electricity running through his head and spine. The circuit breakers did not trip—they almost never trip when a body shorts out the New York subway. Enough electrical current was passing through his skull to accelerate twenty subway cars to full speed. The skin on his face came to an instant boil. A sheet of white blisters passed in a wave over his face. The blisters cratered and turned black.
There was a humming, crackling sound, and his cranial contents boiled. His skull burst with a dull thump, Brain material shot into the air and showered down over the platform. One man was seen wiping his eyes with his hands, then studying his smeared eyeglasses, puzzled by the gray bloody flecks that had seemed to come from nowhere.
An instant later, brakes wailing, the train thudded over the body, cutting it in two, and came to a halt. Smoke began to pour from beneath the car.
Cobra
UNION SQUARE
THE HOUSEKEEPER, Nanette, answered the door. She said that Mr. and Mrs. Moran were staying with relatives.
“There may be something dangerous in Kate’s room. Has anyone been inside?” Austen asked.
No one had been in the room. Kate’s parents couldn’t bear to go in. Her grandmother was going to go through her things once the worst was over. Mr. and Mrs. Moran were busy arranging the funeral, which was scheduled for tomorrow.
Austen had studied the photographs, and she had almost every object in Kate’s bedroom in her mind’s eye. She sat down at the worktable. There in front of her was the box with the rounded, angular crystal painted on it. She reached her hands toward it, stopped. She hesitated. Then she opened her knapsack and pulled out a cardboard box of latex examination gloves. She found a button mask and snapped the rubber band around the back of her head, fixing the mask over her mouth and nose. She found a pair of protective eyeglasses in her knapsack, and she put them on, too. She turned on a desk lamp.
Now, very delicately, she picked the box up. It was about three inches square and was made of some kind of very hard, dense wood. It was a puzzle. There was a sliding catch or mechanism somewhere that would open the box. One of the sides was loose. That might be the opening mechanism.
Should I try to open this? What will happen if I do? Four people are dead, maybe because of this thing. I may already be exposed anyway.
I’m going to open it. “Ephaphtha,” she whispered. Be opened.
She slid her fingers over the box, feeling carefully. There was a click. The box opened and something snapped out of it, fast.
She dropped the box with a yelp. It clattered on the desk.
A snake had popped out. The head and neck of a small wooden snake. It was like a jack-in-the-box. The snake had struck at her fingers, and it had missed. It was a hooded cobra, and its hood was flared open, in the attack stance. It had a red spectacle marking painted across the back of its hood. Its eyes were bright yellow dots with slit irises painted on them. Its tongue was red and forked and stuck out.
The snake was attached to a spring mechanism. When you closed the lid and locked up the puzzle, the spring was cocked. When you pulled on the correct facet, the spring tripped and the snake leaped out and struck at your finger. It was a children’s toy. It had been made by hand, perhaps in India or China, she thought.
Something else had come out of the box. She could just see it in the light of the skylight. It was a grayish dust.
br /> She closed her eyes, jerked her head back, held her mask tight on her face, and ran. She found herself standing on the other side of Kate’s room. She shivered. She was covered with sweat. What was that dust?
She crossed the room again, breathing as lightly as she could in her mask, holding it tightly down over her face, and she picked up the box in her gloved hand. The top was open. She looked inside. Nothing there, except the mechanism and a bit of dust. The thing was a dust-dispersion device. Not very efficient. Just enough to put a little bit of dust into the air near the person who opened the box.
“Oh, my God. My God,” she said. It’s a bomb. It’s a biological bomb.
She kept her hand on her mask, pushing it down over her nose and mouth, hoping the seal was good. What is the pore size of this mask? Will the mask block these dust particles? The problem was, she didn’t know the size of the dust particles. Well, either the dust is getting through the mask or it isn’t. If it has gone through, it’s too late now.
She turned the box over with her fingertips, rotating it only slightly, so as not to cause any dust to fall out. On the bottom of the box was glued a tiny slip of paper with some words printed on it. The words were very small.
Kate would have had a magnifying glass somewhere around here. She opened a drawer under the table. Then she opened another drawer. There. A magnifying loupe.
She held the box up again, near the desk light, and looked through the loupe at the words. She discerned fine black letters, evidently made by a high-quality laser printer.
Human trial #2, April 12
ARCHIMEDES FECIT
She put the box down and looked around the room. The Twinings tea can would do. She got a Kleenex from a pack on Kate’s bedside table. She noticed wadded Kleenexes on the floor near the bed. She almost screamed. If Kate had been blowing her nose on them, they would be hot. She didn’t touch them. She stuffed a wad of fresh Kleenex into the can, and then gently placed the snake bomb in a nest of Kleenex. She snapped down the can’s lid, tight. She held the tea can in her hands. As soon as possible she would have to transfer it to a biohazard bag or container.