Baltimore Noir (20 page)
On Stiles Street now, Bigelow went wide eyed suddenly, retreating, raising his hands.
Three men marched at him, scowling, shoulders hunched, and Bigelow protested. “Hold on, fellas,” he said. “Hey, hold—”
With startling quickness, one of the dark-haired men brought a tire iron onto Bigelow’s head.
Bigelow mewed, staggered, and then issued a sickening gurgle as he fell to his knees.
Another blow, equally efficient, and he heard Bigelow groan.
Bat in hand, he ran forward and, bursting among the men, he slammed Bigelow, cracking him hard across the back of his head, sending him face first onto the wet sidewalk.
The men stomped Bigelow, swearing in Italian.
“My sister,” said the heavyset one, “my kid sister. Son of a bitch.”
Bigelow tried to roll into a ball.
Tess’s father raised the bat and smashed him again, and then again.
And again. And again.
Panting hard, his chest heaving, he looked down, tears mingling with the rain on his face.
Bigelow’s blood spread across the concrete.
He heard the thin, beak-nosed man to his left grunt as he drove his foot into the beaten man’s ribs.
Lisa. Lisa Ghiardini,” the thin man said. “First the mother, then you rape the daughter!”
The girl he’d seen running through the yards was the daughter of the woman Bigelow had pistol-whipped at the Colombo Bank. A girl from the neighborhood.
He staggered back, the bloody bat dangling from his fingers.
As two thin men continued to pound Bigelow, the stout Ghiardini looked up.
“Pete?” he said, gulping air, steam rising from the top of his head. “Pete Sangiovese?”
The two other men stopped for a moment, and Bigelow let out a low groan.
“Pete,” Ghiardini said, gesturing with a meaty hand, “over here. You want another shot? Come on. Take another shot.”
He turned, trotting along the alley. Running. Eager to disappear.
The bat went in the river at Fell’s Point, sinking beneath Styrofoam cups, condoms, and bobbing pop bottles. Before returning to the van, he ran his hands through a puddle, washing away Bigelow’s blood.
He drove quickly back to the hotel, knowing he’d done what he’d had to.
Tess was sleeping, purring gently, and the bathroom light was still on.
The note he’d attached to the mirror above the sink was still there:
“I’ll be right back. Brush your beautiful teeth!”
Her pink toothbrush was dry.
He showered, and planned to wash his shirt and jeans in the hotel’s basement laundry room. He’d have to get new running shoes: Bigelow’s blood soaked through the gray laces, clung to the soles.
Putting on his pajama bottoms, he sat on the bed next to his daughter and he stared at her.
For as long as he had her, they’d be together. He would not let her feel alone.
His eyes moistened as he studied her sweet smile, heartshaped lips, long eyelashes; contentment …
No angels?
How could his father have been so wrong?
C
ell Scope is a science education park that sits like some new blown-up nanotech herpes sore on the lip of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. It’s a massive glass-and-steel base topped with a billowing white roof. Tonight it’s all lit up: holograms, fireworks, lasers, an immense smoke-pot that puffs DNA helixes into the air. Just off Pratt, on the torch-lit front esplanade, a four-girl Cirque du Soleil spinoff band plays whale-call jazz, and it actually sounds haunting, not phony. CEOs from New York and California, Maryland biotech investors, Japanese boys, a couple dozen news cameras, and, lucky me, fifty or sixty print reporters swarm through the mammoth glass doors for tonight’s big opening of Frog Cycle, the demented new exhibit I’m supposed to be promoting.
Or, I should say, Frog Cycle in the Kel-Shor Virtual Pond. Seriously, if Kel-Shor’s paying $4.5 million, I can spew the full name.
And to be truthful, I should state for the record that I am promoting the frogs, no mordant “supposed to be” bullshit.
But you know what? Pushing through the crowd, angling my way inside the main hall, circulating, I’m a redundant publicist. The frogs sell themselves. They’re not just a perfect example of Cell Scope’s mission, the translation of bone-dry sci-tech jargon into lip-smacking juicy lovely-bones show biz; no, they’re wicked, they’re wrong, they’re the end of the world as far as I’m concerned. And this morning, on the test run, they malfunctioned.
The problem is the virtual frogs, the ones featured on the poster. They’re big, they’re ugly, they’re mean. And they slobber. There are a half-dozen of them; they’ve been re-engineered by geneticists who’ve broken off from UMBC. They look fine, just like Florida gopher frogs, except they’re three times as big. Part of Frog Cycle’s appeal is designed to be the interaction between the virtual frogs and Florida tree frogs and green tree frogs and several other scarce tropical frogs and toads. The virtual frogs are supposed to be dominant, but in the misfire this morning the virtuals attacked the naturals, killed them all, ate most of them.
The Kel-Shor people have no idea.
I pop a mint into my mouth and smile past the badges and lapels. There’s a lot of dialogue in the air, a lot of bragging and favor-making. I snag a cup of white wine from a waiter, slurp it in two swallows, and duck into the alcove where a smallish crowd ponders a glass-encased model of Frog Cycle that sits on a silver pedestal. I stand on tiptoe and look over the shoulders of some gruff Japanese guys; it’s a bit Disney, the model, and before I know it I say, “Ah, kawai!” That means
super-cute
.
The taller of the Japanese guys looks sideways at me and nods grimly. “Very very kawai.”
Laurie Hauver’s the money girl. She’s my boss. I usually have a problem with all three categories—girls, money, and bosses—so it’s a pleasure to report that I’m a slave for Laurie, and when I see her disentangle herself from a dilapidated, rouge-unto-death Gilman girl, circa 1990, I kind of plow through the atrium, dodging a Sony robot, an ax-man from used-to-be-Legg-Mason, and a martinet from the
Sun’s
biz page. I almost bounce against Laurie, but her force field does its work, and I stand a few inches back, giving her the once over. She looks like someone who is written into a number of substantial wills. A couple of them death-bed, chickenscratch revisions, screw the notary. She’s just had her hair cut short and dyed goldenrod; she’s wearing a black backless slip dress, black Laboutin stiletto provocations.
“You don’t look too bad,” I tell her, almost taking her arm. “How was it—Lovely Lane? How was the funeral?”
“It’s something else,” she whispers. “It’s the first time I’ve heard the minister refer to the subsequent amputation of the widow’s arms during a proper kind of ceremony. I mean, I know the story, but I don’t care. It made the minister seem a little bit
inside
Like he had his own blog or whatever. I took two propranolol—I’m not coming across numb, am I?”
“The opposite.”
“Thank you.”
I check my watch. “Seven-thirty.”
Laurie looks past me. “When the band finishes, we should go in. Oh, I think they may have just stopped. On cue.”
A sweetly modulated voice urges us to head into the Kel-Shor Virtual Pond. I’ve got to say, I feel sick to my stomach, but some of the people rushing past me, they look like they’re heading into a medieval tribunal. Someone has defaced one of the Frog Cycle posters; now, a drop of blood hangs from the gopher frog’s bottom lip.
“So the Kel-Shor people seem happy,” I say. “Naïve.”
“They know,” she says. “We had to tell them about the misfire. The scientists, um, I think they were persuasive.” “So I’m the naïve one, actually.”
Laurie nods.
“You ready?”
“Let’s go.”
The Kel-Shor Virtual Pond is a five-thousand-square-foot body of water encased in glass with about twenty yards of open air above it. The scientists have really, really messed with nature and speeded up the virtual frogs’ metabolisms. They’ve rigged the weather in the pond so the frogs go through one year in about three hours. What happens is, you sit there looking at the pond in winter, and the frogs are frozen and the pond is frozen and all of the plants are either dead or frozen and the air looks forbidding. So you watch, and the artificial sun gets brighter and the plants bud and start to grow and the ice on top of the pond breaks and the water totally sparkles and it’s fresh-looking and the frogs start to come to life.
The pond is ringed by a metallic mesh barrier, and it’s covered with a frosted white plastic dome. Beneath the dome, green and brown blobs move like blips on a cardiac monitor.
Movie theater seats run in tiers at a steep stadium pitch away from the pond. The capacity is 312. The first three rows are reserved for staff, VIPs, and the differently abled.
I’m in the front row, at a bad angle, getting settled into my seat, when a taut woman in a forest-green sheath, pearls, and sparkling silver flip-flops gives me her hand and introduces herself as Rie. I’ve already been briefed on her; she’s a potential “problem,” so I’ve got to baby-sit.
“My brother runs Kel-Shor,” she says, and plops into the seat beside me.
Without warning, the dangling halogen chandeliers begin to dim and the Frog Cycle soundtrack—cellos, moogs, crickets, a faux-Enya—swells over the sound system.
The modulated voice, this time slightly perturbed, says,
“Welcome to the Kel-Shor Corporation’s Virtual Pond, home to Frog Cycle.”
Applause. Applause. Standing O. Someone says
hush. Ssshhh
The cowfolk settle themselves.
Rie sort of winces at me, and then the funniest thing happens: She takes my hand.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“I’m
scared
“It’s fine. I’ve seen it twenty-seven times. It’s astonishing.”
The voice is back:
“The development of a successful farming industry—for any amphibious species—depends on the regular and predictable supply of eggs. To harness efficient, safe technologies, to spawn domesticated amphibious species, is the goal. We look to Frog Cycle in the Kel-Shor Virtual Pond. We look. We see.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Rie whispers.
“The company thinks it’s subliminal,” I say. “Believe me.”
“I hate my brother.”
“Oh.”
The frosted dome cover begins to gently lift from the Virtual Pond. It hovers for a moment before it snaps into a lattice harness on the ceiling, pulling with it, like so many spider webs, the clinking clear-filament netting that encloses the pond and its environment.
Rie whispers, “Whoa.”
Uncovered, the Virtual Pond looks like a cel from a Pixar movie. The blues are so wet and the greens are so crisp. The plantlife is gnarled but it’s accented with, um, “cute” touches, such as tawny freckled trunks and smile-pattern leaves. The water itself is clear as a spring. Silver fish dive and spiral to the surface. You can see the pebbled bottom—ferns, tricks of light, the blipping brown creatures.
At first, you don’t think that the showpiece frogs, the engineered virtuals, are in the pond. You think they’re waiting for the air to warm up, for the sun to blaze a little bit more brilliantly.
I look down the aisle, trying to catch Laurie’s eyes, when it happens. The gasps—all at once, like the whoosh of a roller coaster twisting its first descent. Rie’s got a strong grip, the muscles in my arm are tense where her fingers poke me.
“It’s them,” she says.
“Yeah,” I say.
Them. Three chunky brown rocks covered with moss at the edge of the water. The three sit side by side like little lords, grinning insouciantly. Like boulders that grin—broad, immovable.
Until it moves.
The smallest—it’s the size of a small fat cat—opens its mouth and lets out a low rumble. It lifts its head and takes an astonishing leap and lands with a moist thud, eight yards to its left, scattering a group of small navy-green pygmy frogs, who let out high-pitched shrieks.
The voice purrs:
“In spring, the frogs come out of hibernation. To mate.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Rie says. She lets go of my arm and makes a pucker-face at me.
The voice goes on:
“The male frog embraces the female, holding her tight with his arms. This is the act of oviposition. It may last several days.”
“Oh, come on!” Rie snorts.
The second of the three virtual frogs flies into the air and leaps the entire long length of the pond, like a hurdler showing off. It lands on the opposite shore, bellowing in the direction of a tiny albino toad. Its glistening haunches tremble in the light.
Suddenly, lights mounted in the pond increase in brightness so the water’s utterly translucent. There are hundreds of tadpoles in the water, zipping in circles.
The voice says,
“Cell Scope scientists have patented a gene technique that speeds up the frog’s internal clock.”
“That’s enough,” Rie says. She looks out at the audience, in tiers behind us and in a high, quivering voice shouts, “Somebody stop the music!”
There’s some laughter, a lot of
shhs
and
“be quiets.”
I’m relieved. The audience is loving Frog Cycle. The way you love a hunt, a dog fight. You’re supposed to yell,
Stop!
Maybe you’re supposed to yell,
Somebody stop the music!
I take Rie’s hand. “This is real,” I tell her. “This is really happening.”
Suddenly I feel warmth. I smell algaeic warm wet air. Breath. Venting on my cheek and down my neck. I look over at Rie, and she shakes her head at me. “It’s not me, asshole,” she says.
I turn and meet its eye. The biggest frog. We’re talking twenty pounds. It’s less than a yard from me, its big bull head pushing against the mesh barrier, wheezing and looking right at me. A string of drool hangs from its lower lip.
I let out a little cry, my feet scrabbling along the floor. The frog roars. The mesh is chinking and clanging and groaning with its weight.
“You’re making it happen,” Rie says. “My brother’s making it happen.” But she lets me hold her hand, so I know we’re safe. I look up the tier; Laurie gives me a quick nod.
We’re in a helicopter out of Martin State. There’s an after-party in Talbot County. I am completely smashed, nearly falling asleep, head bouncing against a window. Over the roar of the engine, I can hear Rie behind me, slurring, giggling. “All I could think of was reproduction,” she’s saying. “I kept looking, against my will, at those hips moving like a piston, spewing that filthy clotted cream. Wasn’t it so terrible? Wasn’t it? That was so disgusting. Every time I close my eyes, I just see it—and I think it should be outlawed. Oh, but maybe I want to see it just one more time.”
For a while, no one speaks. I’m kind of staring out at the purple night clouds and the sparkle of the shoreline in the distance.
Rie makes a little purring noise. I can hear her lips. I guess she’s kissing the guy in the seat next to hers.
“My God, honey,” she says all throat, “my brother made that happen.”
