My Brother's Keeper (12 page)

"I can guess." There was a long silence at the other end of the phone. I could visualize the frown on her forehead and the lower lip pinched between her teeth.

"Don't go back there," she said at last. "They know you got away, so they'll have made sure there are no signs left." (She believed me! I felt a huge sense of relief.) "And don't go back to your place, either. They might be watching there."

"I need clothes—I don't even have a check book on me."

"Leave that to me. I'll go to your place this afternoon."

"It's too dangerous." My hand started to shake when I thought of Dixie getting his hands on Tess. "If they're watching—"

"I won't be on my
own
, you nit. I'll ask a friendly copper to go in with me—but I'll need you to call your landlord to let me in."

"Tess, I can't let you do it. You've no idea what Scouse and his thugs are like. If they get their hands on you—"

"I'll call you late this afternoon, when I'm all done. You stay there, or go into Central London—that'll be safe enough. What's your number at the hotel?"

I argued for another minute, and got nowhere. Tess was using the same manner on me that she reserved for uncooperative patients.

"Don't ask for me," I said, as she was about to hang up. "I'm registered as Jan Dussek."

"Who? "

"Dussek. He was a pianist back in Beethoven's time. It's the first name I could think of. Oh, another thing. The pills that Sir Westcott gave me."

"What about them?"

"Will you ask him if they're Nymphs?"

"If they're what?"

"Nymphs. I don't know what they are either. Ask him, all right?"

"I'll do it." But I could tell from her voice that my overall credibility was slumping.

I was left with the rest of the day to kill. For a while I lay on the bed in my room, thinking of Scouse and his louts and doing a slow burn. To get what they wanted, they were quite prepared to torture, kidnap, threaten, and kill. The last one wasn't a certainty, but I didn't like the way that Scouse had talked about Valnora Warren—the suggestion of past tense about it. To find out what Leo had been doing (What
had
Leo been doing?) they would crush Lionel Salkind like a beetle, casually and easily. Well, if they thought they could do that they had better think again. I was still an independent agent, and I had one resource they couldn't dream of. From now on, I wouldn't just note any actions that seemed to reflect Leo's memories or responses—I would seek them out, follow up on them, and do my best to interpret them.

My thoughts had run on haphazardly, but by the time I sat up on my bed my mind was made up. I wouldn't be totally passive, running and hiding. I would fight back and look for my own answers. I took a long, hot bath, then went out of the hotel and bought a new shirt and new pants. The day was pleasant, warm enough to encourage me to go into the City center and stroll about in the sunshine.

And it was there, while I sat on a bench in the quiet of St. James Park, that Leo with my assistance finally scored a direct hit. When I stood outside the bookstore I had something to work on. Over the hills and far away—India—flower perfumes, and secrecy, and awful sexual excitement. The strength of those feelings almost swamped me, but they also offered the direction for my next actions. By the time I went back to the hotel I knew what I had to do.

Tess's message was waiting for me there. Her house, any time after seven. She had my case and everything I needed. And a surprise.

Tess lived alone in a two-bedroom house in Henley, too big for her but kept for its garden—her pride and joy. I went in the back way, past neatly tied raspberry canes and flaming rows of salvias, on to peer in through the kitchen window and knock on the pane. Tess opened the back door and let me in without a word. She gave me a quick hug once I was inside the door, then stepped back out of reach. Her face was anxious and the frown lines were deeper than ever.

"He believes you now," she said. "I've never seen Sir Westcott look so surprised. He hates to be wrong."

"You told him everything?"

"Not at first—I knew he thought you had imagined everything, and he'd say you were giving us another tall story. So after we finished the wards I asked him right out: if he had any idea what `Nymphs' were."

"He told you?"

"Not at first. He looked at me pop-eyed, and said he'd be buggered, and where had I heard that word? He thought there must have been a bad breach in the security system."

Tess led the way through into the living room, motioned me to the couch and seated herself on a chair opposite. Her posture said a lot. Feet neatly together, hands on knees. She didn't want me close until she got this off her chest.

"So those pills he gave me really are Nymphs," I said. "Dammit, Sir Westcott told me—"

"They're not Nymphs." Tess nodded her head towards the side table, inviting me to help myself to the coffee and sandwiches there. "He told you the truth, you have a new synthetic neurotransmitter in that pillbox. Nymphs are something different—a secret shared by the police, a few doctors, and international security. They're capsules, and they look like the ones you have—blue, usually—and they're the hottest and worst illegal drug anybody knows about. The papers haven't printed a word about them, though they must suspect that something is happening, just from the hospital reports. Sir Westcott is on some sort of blue ribbon royal panel studying the physical and mental effects—that's why he knows all about it. He gave me a choice, either I'd tell him I didn't remember a word he was going to say, or I'd be tied up in secrecy agreements for weeks."

I leaned forward. "Tess, they were all set to torture me last night. If Nymphs are a big secret, it's one that's a lot less well-kept than Sir Westcott thinks. Dixie thought those pills were Nymphs and proved I must be Leo. The crooks know all about them."

She nodded. "Sure they do, some of them. They're part of the distribution system. The drug is made somewhere in the East—India, or Afghanistan, or Pakistan—and finds its way into this country from abroad. It's synthetic, but producing it is difficult—thank Heaven. It's a derivative of Salvarsan—a dihydroxy-arsenobenzene hydrochloride, one of the old treatments for syphilis. That's too much of a mouthful for anybody, so the pills are mostly misnamed Nymphetamines—Nymphs, for short."

"But what do they do to you? They can't be like heroin or cocaine. Dixie said I'd only be using them for one thing, and he said Zan was too old for them."

"He was right." Tess sighed. "Can't you guess, with a name like that? Nymphetamines don't have much effect at all on adults. They affect children. They induce sexual desire and physical arousal responses—sensitivity, lubrication and increased blood supply for the vaginal mucous membranes—in prepubescent girls."

I sat there with my mouth hanging open. "I don't believe it. You think that people would buy those pills and give them . . ."

I didn't need to ask the question. I knew the answer. When I was seventeen years old and on my first concert tour, I played a series of two-piano works with Duncan Casimir. He was seventy-two years old, he drank too much, and his playing was terrible, but he was still considered a grand old man of English music. I saw him when the young girls came crowding around us at the end of the concerts. He was practically drooling. And it wasn't over the ones I thought were attractive, the sixteen and seventeen year olds. He had his bloodshot old eyes on the tens and under. I'd seen the same thing a hundred times since, what old Casimir would delicately refer to as a "refined taste for slightly unripe fruit." Nymphs wouldn't lack for a market.

" . . . so your brother must have been mixed up with Nymphs, somehow," Tess saying. "Maybe he was trying to find out where they come from, or perhaps how they get to the west."

"No, that wasn't it." I leaned back without thinking, and winced when Dixie's cigarette burn pressed on the back of the settee. "That's just what Leo
wasn't
doing, I know that from last night. Dixie said I had to be Leo when he found the Nymphs, because no ordinary person would be carrying them. But Scouse saw past that. He said if they were Nymphs I wouldn't have carried them into the country with me, and anyway that's not what he was after. Leo was involved in something different—the Belur Package, whatever that is. But not with Nymphs. What else did Sir Westcott say about them?"

"Not too much. There have been four hundred reported cases in this country, with ages from seven to twelve. He thinks that the drug travels overland from Athens, and comes there either from Turkey or one of the Arab countries."

I shrugged and poured myself a cup of coffee. Neither of us knew it at the time, but Tess and I were very close to an answer. If she had asked one more simple question of Sir Westcott, we would have saved months of work, much pain and suffering, and many lives.

"I told him about you," she went on. "He's really pleased. He says that ten years ago you'd have died, and even five years ago, before the Madrill technique, you'd at best be just trying to stand up by now. As it is, the brain integration is the only big hurdle left. He did wonder a bit about the possibility of a seminal reflux from the
vas deferens
to the
epididymis
—the X-ray shows a slight residual lesion there." She laughed. "I told him I didn't know, I wasn't equipped to test for that."

With my mind still on Nymphs and the Belur Package, I hadn't been listening. It was the medical terms that caught my attention. I did a mental recap and suddenly realized what she was saying.

"Tess! You don't mean that you told Sir Westcott about us? That we'd been—that we—"

"Of course. He's your doctor." She sounded surprised. "He'll know better than we will if there was anything abnormal, anything that doesn't fit what he'd expect in a normal recovery. He asked me what happened—somehow he knew we went to dinner—and I told him."

"God. You make the other night sound like just another medical test—Intermediate Number Twenty-two, Response to Intercourse." I couldn't keep the hurt out of my voice. "I'd thought it was more than that. I'm surprised you didn't take my blood pressure and pulse afterwards."

Tess had been sitting quietly opposite me, knees together, prim and virginal in her posture. Now she stood up and came to stand directly in front of me. She was wearing a dark blue blouse that gave color to her eyes and made them seem almost violet.

"Lionel," she said softly. "Don't be a ninny." She reached out and cupped my cheek in her hand. "You've been through a medical experience wilder than any other patient I've ever heard of. You're alive, but that's only half the battle. We knew that someday you'd try to make love again, and that might be a time for difficulties—and maybe danger, too. I wanted you to be all right; and you were."

"You want the best for all your patients."

"You're more than my patient. That night was a test, sure it was, but it was a lot more than that for me. You're the hard one, not me. You never give up much of yourself, do you? Maybe Leo was the same, maybe not. But last night when you didn't call I was worried out of my head. If I called your flat once, I did it ten times. I thought you might have had a collapse, or be in pain, or all sorts of things. I even called the hospitals in the area, to see if you had checked into one."

For Tess, that was a very long speech. I sat there in silence for a few seconds. "I'm sorry," I said at last. I had to clear my throat before I could speak again. "You're right. I'm a selfish bastard, and underneath I guess I'm a prude as well."

Deep down Tess had touched another nerve.
You never give up much of yourself, do you? Maybe Leo was the same, maybe not.
Those words stung more because I had had that thought, too. Leo gave more of himself, and more was given back in return.

I reached up to take her hands and drew her gently forward to sit by me on the couch.

"I'm sorry," I said again. "What you did was quite right. Would you tell me what else Sir Westcott told you? I promise I won't mind."

"He said that the crucial period is still ahead, no matter how well you feel now. There will be a time when the main integration of brain tissue will happen, and when it does the Madrill technique goes out of control. The information transfer will become very fast—like a hole in a dike, he said, first a trickle, then a sudden flood. When that happens you have to be somewhere quiet. You'll pass out, and you'll need good medical care."

"I've had the same sort of warning from him in person." I turned to look at her. "No point in worrying about that until it happens. But what about—you know. Did he say that it's all right for me to have sex? Am I well enough for it?"

The frown lines were gone from her forehead, "You had no pain last time, did you?"

"Did you hear me groaning?"

"Yes." Tess smiled. "But I heard me groaning, too, and I wasn't in pain."

"So everything is all right."

"I don't know." She didn't look worried, but her face wore a softer, heavy-eyed look, almost like a drowsiness. "You've had scientific training, too. You know you can't draw statistical conclusions from a single experiment. You need more data points."

"How many samples does it take?" I put my arm around her shoulder and drew her closer.

She slid forward to move her body against me. "I think that depends on you more than me."

For the first time in twenty-four hours Scouse and his gang were pushed beyond even the periphery of my attention. I hadn't realized it the first night, but Tess must have been holding part of herself in check, watching me for any signs of trouble or discomfort. Now she was willing to let herself go completely. We gave Sir Westcott's handiwork a severe test, and it passed again. I did have an after-the-fact ache in my right side, but Tess felt around it and diagnosed a simple muscle strain.

By eleven o'clock we were lying together in Tess's luxurious double bed. I knew from her breathing that she was drowsing, but for me sleep wouldn't come. A summer storm was on the way, and we lay there with the curtains open and the window cracked to let in the warm night air. The flicker of sheet lighting, far off, and an occasional distant grumble of thunder created in me the postcoital depression that Ovid attributed to all animals.