Gibbon's Decline and Fall (25 page)

“Jake is in a mood, isn't he?” muttered Harmston.

“You don't call him Jake to his face,” remarked Swinter in a snide tone. “Better not call him Jake to anybody.”

“Sorry. I meant Mr. Jagger. What's he so up about this trial, anyhow? It's not much.”

Swinter murmured, “You know what Mr. Jagger stands for, Emmet! He's not a member of the Alliance just because it's good for business—he's a real American. He's willing to stand up against the people that want to ruin our country, and you know who they are, Vince. He's not afraid to say a lesbian's really a pussy-suckin' dyke. You know what I'm sayin? Mr. Jagger told me, he said, this little bitch baby killer, she's a symbol of everything that's wrong with our country. I mean, when women forget their duty and their place, that's the end, right? Mr. Jagger wants to send a message.”

Harmston nodded thoughtfully. “Crespin's from New York, originally. Lots of Jews in New York.”

“Nah,” said Swinter, his brow furrowed. “She's not a Jew. She's Catholic. Or used to be. So we'll see what we can find.”

He shook his head, slightly annoyed. With an attractive female witness or opposing lawyer, Jake had a way of letting his eyes travel up her legs and under her clothes. By the time he was through looking up her skirt, the whole jury would think she was selling it on the street. Unfortunately, however, the Carolyn Crespin he had seen out at the jail was stout, sixtyish, and looked like somebody's grandma. Not a prime target.

He turned in his chair, casting a glance at the dais. “Here comes Mr. Jagger, and there's our speaker, ready to tell us all about brotherly love.”

O
PHY SAT IN HER OFFICE
at Misery, holding a coffee cup in one hand as the other busily sorted bits of paper into piles. Patient notes. When in hell was she going to get time to record this stuff? She couldn't concentrate, anyhow. Simon had called last night. Hi, darling, how you doing? Great, great, gotta run. Got a story brewing in the Balkan Protectorates.

“Simon,” she'd pleaded, hating the whine in her voice. “When are you coming home?”

Silence at the other end of the line. God, why didn't he just tell her, whatever it was? “I need you,” she murmured. “I really do.”

Throat clearing.

“Tell me,” she demanded. “Simon, for God's sake, tell me!”

“Ah,” he said. “Damn. Ophy, I'll be home next week. Let's talk about it then.”

Talk about what then? Had he met someone else? Was he in trouble? What the hell?

It did no good to speculate. Speculation only made the matter seem worse. Weighing down the paper scraps with a couple of books, she slipped out of her suit jacket and into the long lab coat she habitually wore at Misery. Get this meeting out of the way, get her notes recorded, and she'd be caught up by noon. It was Friday. Starting tomorrow, she would have
four days off. And Simon, damn him, was playing world traveler!

Was he covering bag-lady terrorism, wherever he was? Were old ladies making bonfires of cosmetics and stockings and sexy underwear?
Time
magazine called it the revolt of the unwashed against the overdecorated. How about the Family Values Shock Troops with their switches and whips, driving women off the streets? Or the Sons of Adam, who were still picking off unveiled girls on street corners? Were they wherever Simon was, as well? How about the cultists? Three more bunches of bodies found this week, a total of over five thousand bodies since the first of the year, burned, shot, poisoned, hanged—lots of them children. The mad leading the mad, the blind leading the blind. Was Simon covering all that?

The conference room was on the second floor, off a back corridor and facing the light well at the center of the building, a quiet location. The dozen or so people already in the room were as quiet. Most of them were working on their first or second cups of coffee, needing more before they'd even be awake. The chief sat to one side, well-shaven morning face rosy with aftershave, but no more alert than the rest of them.

Ophy came in, mumbling “Good morning” to the others, some of whom grunted in reply. She fetched herself a cup of coffee and joined them at the table, two seats down from the chief. She had her nose sunk in her coffee when the door opened and strangers came in.

“Here they are,” muttered the chief, nodding toward the man and woman who stood murmuring to one another in the doorway. “Lotte,” he called. “Come on in.”

The couple advanced, he putting his briefcase on the table before turning back to close the door. With some effort Ophy brought her mind back to the table as the chief made introductions:

“Lotte Epstein. Joe Snider. Dr. Ophy Gheist, chief of quartage here at MSRI; Jean Morrison, Southside and MSRI ob-gyn; Genevieve Simmons, Citywide Internal Medicine; her associate, Roger Falls. Ben Morrell, Surgical Services …” And so on and so on.

“If you all have coffee, I'll turn this meeting over to Dr. Epstein. Lotte and I are old friends; we met in school; she's been with the Centers for Disease Control as long as I've been in medicine.…”

His voice trailed off and he sat down, gesturing vaguely at
the plump little woman to his right. She was a grandmotherly type, all rosy-cheeked, with soft white hair. Her expression wasn't grandmotherly, however, unless it was Red Riding Hood's grandma. She looked urgently apprehensive. Ophy sat up straighter and paid attention.

“We can't enforce a silence order, but we're asking that you not discuss this meeting with anyone, not even with one another outside this room. This is one of several such meetings we've had and will be having. We're looking for data.…”

“What?” demanded Genevieve Simmons, thrusting out her jaw. “Data about what?”

“Give her time, Genevieve.” The chief cleared his throat. “Let Lotte tell it.”

Lotte cleared her throat. “All right. Back in early 1998 we began to receive reports from health departments that cult deaths, suicides, and suicide attempts were all increasing. The suicide rates had been rising for years among teenagers, but in ninety-eight they began climbing the age ladder. The cult deaths covered all age groups. We also saw a doubling in the number of sexual assaults, though they stayed in the usual age group, midteens to midthirties. The opinion among psych people was that people were joining cults out of fear, were killing themselves out of fear, that even the sexual assaults had some basis in stress.” She cleared her throat. “Kind of an ‘I'm going to die anyway, why not get it over with?' or maybe, ‘I'm going to catch AIDS eventually, why not get it over with?' It made as much sense as any other theory.

“Six months ago, however, though the cult deaths were still at an all-time high and the suicide rate was still climbing, rapes had fallen almost to nothing. The psych people still thought the cause was the fear of violence. As you all know, however, random public violence began to abate in ninety-eight, in the wake of drug legalization and increased home officing. The fewer people out in public, the less public violence. Polls show that the public believes hibernation and deactivation vaults have removed the worst offenders from circulation. In other words, rightly or wrongly, the public perceives a reduction in violence. Naive common sense dictates that when a fear is eliminated, or at least ameliorated, conditions arising from that fear should also be ameliorated.”

“You're saying they weren't?” Dr. Simmons again.

“From the beginning we were troubled by the fact that many of the suicides were people who didn't fit the theory,
people who were at very low risk of either dying by violence or contracting sexual diseases. Amish men and women, for example, who had had little or no sexual contact prior to marriage, who were married while young to equally young virgin spouses, who do not and have never used drugs.”

“Fear doesn't have to be realistic to cause problems,” blurted Dr. Swales. “And why in hell isn't somebody here from Psychiatric?”

“We met with the people at Central Psych first,” said Joe Snider. “Days ago. They said the same thing you did. Fear needn't be grounded in fact to cause problems. So they looked at our data—which include about nine times as many men as women, by the way—and they postulated the suicide attempts as a response to the loss of male status through enforcement of sexual-equality laws, as a response to lowered self-esteem, or maybe as a response to unemployment, societal disintegration, or overcrowding. They quoted animal studies at us. They pooh-poohed the whole thing.”

“Meantime,” Lotte Epstein interrupted, “the number of reported suicides continued to rise. We can assume people who get into cults or try suicide are seriously depressed, and we know depression does not exist in a vacuum, so we began looking for some corollary effects.”

“Like what?” Morrell asked impatiently.

She looked in his direction, responding patiently. “Is there increased demand for mental-health services? Is there increased absenteeism in industry? Increased sales of antidepressant drugs? Anything and everything that might give us a handle on this.”

“Divorce,” said Ophy, aware of a sharp discomfort. “You'd expect the divorce rate to go up. If not divorce, then couples ah … maybe … living apart. Things like that.” She shook her head gently, trying to dislodge whatever it was that scraped inside her skull.

Snider nodded, made a note. “Anything else?”

Jean Morrison asked, “Since you've got attempts included in your data, someone must have asked the survivors why they did it.”

Lotte shrugged. “Of course. They give us as many answers as there are victims. Fear, sex, stress, money, pressure, worry.”

“What about the birth rate?” Ophy asked. “If more and
more people are depressed, wouldn't you expect the birth rate to go down?”

“We've seen no significant change through 1998, which is the last year we have complete data for. We actually have more recent data on the suicide rate than on birth rates. Birth and death statistics are handled differently in every state, and there is no uniform system that will give us up-to-date compilations. We seem to be about two years behind on the routine stuff. Perhaps Dr. Morrison has a handle on that?”

Jean shrugged. “We're going through one of those little seasonal slumps right now. I haven't noticed any big changes.”

Ophy poured herself a glass of water from the pitcher before her, moistened her dry mouth, then turned to Lotte Epstein. “What do you want from us? Confirmation that this is happening?”

“We know it's happening. We don't know whether we're seeing the iceberg itself or only the tip. We want to alert the medical establishment, but we want to do it quietly, so we don't have a panic. There could still be some simple explanation.”

Ophy shook her head. “It's bizarre. Could it have anything to do with the other bizarre things that are happening? The bag-lady riots?”

“They might both be manifestations of some underlying cause, I suppose,” said Lotte. “Maybe overcrowding.”

“But overcrowding couldn't be the only cause,” interrupted Snider. “We tested that hypothesis, of course, but some of the earliest cases came from sparsely populated areas. Wyoming. Montana. Nevada.”

Lotte held up her hand, silencing the babble that erupted. “We've had this same conversation a dozen times with a dozen different groups. We don't expect you to come up with a solution. We may be panicking over a statistical blip! All we're asking is that you be alert, that you take meticulous histories on any attempted suicides. That you get as much information as you can on successful suicides and cult-related deaths. We've worked out a questionnaire, and we'll leave copies; get as many cases filled out as you can, quickly, please. Of course, if any one of you has a flash of insight, that would be most welcome, too. These cards have both my office and home numbers if you think of something brilliant.”

She wound up the meeting in businesslike fashion, saying to the room at large, “I think Dr. Gheist may have a point
about other bizarre behavior. Ask about that, as well. Get information about environmental factors, also. We have nothing at this point to indicate this is anything but chance, but we should exclude no possibility. In return for your cooperation, we'll let you in on anything we come up with.”

A general mumble. Ophy fastened her gaze on the opposite wall and let the speculation continue around her. There was something tapping at the back of her mind, tiny finger taps on a closed gate. Something. She knew something, but she couldn't remember. Maybe when Simon came home. He was always good to talk with when she was puzzled. Maybe when … maybe if.

Ophy was in the shower that night when she remembered what it was that had been bothering her: One of Sophy's books had included a story about a battered wife in the U.S., and she had half remembered it during the meeting. Why had that come to mind? What did it have to do with this morning's discussion? Sophy's stories were almost entirely about women and children, but according to Lotte, it wasn't mostly women who were dying. It was mostly men.