The Art of Forgetting (31 page)

              “She has a good side?” Lloyd said.

              “It’ll be fun. It’s in that big hall at the end of Navy Pier. Silent auction, big band music, dancing, champagne…”

              “Except for the champagne, I’m against all those things as a matter of principle,” Lloyd said.

              “And we could get a hotel room for the night, with a view of the lake.”

              “You know, you’re starting to make a compelling argument,” Lloyd said. He bit into his sandwich. His eyes smiled at Erin as he chewed. Then he tensed up. He swallowed and said, “Hold on! Show me those tickets again.”

              Erin gave him a blank look. She retrieved the tickets from her purse and handed them to Lloyd. He thought he had seen something in those couple of seconds, but it had taken a minute for it to register. He grabbed the tickets and inspected them. There, near the bottom, along with the names and logos of the various companies sponsoring the event was the insignia of Cardio-Prime Technologies.

              “What’s the matter?” Erin asked.

              “Look,” Lloyd said, pointing at the top ticket. “That’s Cardio-Prime Technologies.”

              “So?” Erin shrugged. There was a tinge of pink to her cheeks.

              “Now why would a company that makes heart pacemakers sponsor a fund-raiser for an Alzheimer support group?”

              She bit into her sandwich and chewed slowly, staring blankly at the tickets in Lloyd’s hand. He studied the tickets a moment longer before setting them on the table under a bottle of water to prevent a breeze from blowing them away.

              “Lloyd,” Erin said. “I have to tell you something. Promise you won’t be mad at me.”

              “What is it?”

              “No, not now. Not here. What if I stop by your house tonight?”

              Chapter 33

             
A
fter lunch, Lloyd ran into Mark O’Keefe at the coffee dispenser in the Cafeteria.

              “Jesus, Lloyd,” Mark said. “How’re you holding up?”

              Lloyd shrugged. “They got me teaching P-Dog this afternoon.” Physical diagnosis, or P-Dog, was the lowest form of scutwork for attendings, normally considered the purview of chief residents and clinical instructors: medical staff so junior that they weren’t even offered the title of assistant professor.

              “Hang in there,” Mark whispered. “I hear Uncle Marty’s trying to cut some sort of deal with Lasko to get you off the hook. Everything’s going to be alright.”

              “What sort of deal?”

              “I don’t know, man, I don’t know. But you didn’t hear it from me.” O’Keefe slowly pressed a plastic lid on his smoking hot cup of coffee. “Just hang in there a little longer, and for fuck’s sake, keep your nose clean.”

              Lloyd had a couple of hours to kill. He hadn’t checked in on Kaz yet that day so he decided to head up to the lab. Oddly, the door was locked.

              He pulled out his keys and unlocked the door. As soon as he stepped inside he knew something was amiss. There was an eerie silence. No piano sonatas playing – just the hum of the refrigerator motors.

              “Kaz?” Lloyd called out.

              There was no answer. He glanced at his wristwatch. It was twelve-fifteen. Maybe he stepped out for an errand, Lloyd thought, or went to grab an early lunch. But Kaz usually brown-bagged and ate in the lab. Lloyd walked into his office and checked his messages. There was a single message from Kowalski. He tried calling him back but there was no answer.

              Lloyd stepped back into the doorway of his office and leaned on the jamb to survey the lab. Everything seemed to be in its proper place yet something wasn’t quite right. His ears perked up. There was a faint rustling from one of the cages.

              He paced across the lab and peered into the first cage. Double-o-six was running on his exercise wheel. Lloyd smiled and said, “Hey there, buddy.”

              He looked in the next cage where Double-o-seven was on his side, fast asleep. Or was he really sleeping? A tiny tooth protruded from the thin, pink bottom lip. Lloyd tapped on the cage. The mouse didn’t budge. He grabbed the top corner of the cage and gave it a shake. Now the mouse did move. It hovered above the bed of sawdust with the vibrations of the cage like a fuzzy Hacky Sack before coming to a dead rest. Lloyd reached in the cage and poked the mouse’s belly with his index finger. It was stiff.

              Lloyd felt his face grow flush. He stared at the tiny furry mass for a moment then stepped over to peer in the next cage. Another dead mouse, but it wasn’t a secret agent. The number on the cage read “4125”, a control mouse. The next cage belonged to Double-o-five, who was clearly dead.

              Lloyd went through all the cages, shaking them frantically. In all, six of the ten mice were dead. There was no food in the cages, but they couldn’t possibly have starved. Not this fast.

              Where the hell was Kaz? Lloyd grabbed his cell phone and dialed Kaz’s number. The tone sounded six times then kicked into voicemail. Lloyd hung up and dialed the number again. Still no answer. This time Lloyd left a message: “Kaz, where the hell are you? We’ve got major problems in the lab. Call me, stat!”

              Lloyd pressed the phone against his forehead. A chill ran down his spine. He dialed Kaz’s number yet again. The tone sounded once, twice… On the third ring, Kaz answered. In Russian. His voice was hoarse and feeble.

              “What the hell is going on Kaz? Where are you?” Lloyd said.

              Anger was a far more bearable emotion than the dread that was building inside of Lloyd.

              Kaz said nothing. Then Lloyd heard a childlike sobbing.

              “Kaz, are you okay?”

              “I’m not feeling very well. I think I have the flu,” Kaz managed to say with some effort.

             
The flu in June?

              “Kaz, what’s the matter? Talk to me,” Lloyd said.

              “Lloyd, I’m dying. I’m so sorry. I’m dying.”

              “I’ll be right over,” Lloyd said.

              He placed the phone on the counter and patted down his pockets for his keys. He pulled the keys out of his right front lab coat pocket, took his lab coat off and tossed it on the lab counter where it parachuted on top of his cell phone.

              Lloyd ran across the lab, pulled the door shut behind him and headed straight for the stair well. There was no time to waste waiting for an elevator. As he ran down the steps, two at a time, he realized he forgot to ask Kaz for his address. And now he wasn’t sure if he remembered how to get there. He had only been to Kaz’s apartment once, and that was over a year ago. But he’d remember how to get there. He was a fucking memory expert after all. Surely he had planted a memory device that time that he drove there. If he could only remember what it was! And he hoped to hell that Kaz hadn’t moved without telling him.

              Lloyd opened the fire door of the stair well on the ground floor and started down the hospital corridor. The sight of a doctor rushing across the floor of a hospital isn’t terribly unusual, but Lloyd was sprinting, zigzagging dangerously to avoid the slower pedestrians.

              At last he took a sharp right into the corridor that led to the parking garage, almost crashing into the cart of a housekeeper. A few minutes later he was on his motorcycle, tearing through the left lane of Cermak Road heading east.

              The problem was that as he swerved around cars to pass them, he was distracted by the effort of scouring his memory. He knew Kaz lived in Cicero, somewhere off of Cermak Road, in the basement apartment of a two story home next to a house with puke-green aluminum siding awnings hanging over the windows. But how would he find it?  All the streets in Cicero looked pretty much the same, and neighboring Berwyn and South Lawndale looked no different.

              He had to think of landmarks. Surely he had selected a marker to help remind him the route. He just couldn’t remember what it was. He slowed as a car backed out of a parking space, downshifted with a swift flick of his foot, swerved back in the left lane and accelerated past the obstruction.

              There were train tracks behind Kaz’s house. He remembered that much. Hell, there are train tracks all over Chicago. That wouldn’t help. But the side street at the end of the block was a dead end, he recalled. He remembered having to make a U-turn when he missed the turn onto his street. But wait, it wasn’t railroad tracks behind the house. It was the end-of-the-line yard of an El line.
Which El goes to Cicero?

              He weaved around a flower delivery van that was slowing down for a yellow light on Ridgeland Avenue, gunned the engine and made it across the intersection almost before the light turned red.

              The large 24-hour laundromat on the left looked familiar. Lloyd was pretty sure he had passed it on his way to Kaz’s apartment, but then again the sensation might just be a form of misattribution. Fucking memory!

              The Pink line. The Pink line goes to Cicero, ends at 54th and Cermak, so his house must be in that general vicinity. He sped up as he went past Lombard and Harvey, past taco joints and tax preparation offices. A large clinic on the right had a huge blue awning with white block letters that advertised school physicals and “
Examenes de Inmigracion
”.

              There was a pharmacy, he remembered, a pharmacy on a corner and across from it, a banquet hall with a rotating sign. The coat of arms on the sign featured an eagle. And not an American eagle: a double-headed Russian eagle. That was the visual landmark he had set for himself.

              Lloyd leaned forward and thrust the throttle upward. Would a cop believe he was heading to a medical emergency, on a motorcycle, in Cicero?  Two blocks later the faded sign of the Royal Crescent Banquet Hall came into view. He slowed, shifted his weight to lean into the curve and banked left. Then he took a right onto the side street that dead-ends into the El yard. He proceeded more slowly now, almost took a turn into one street but realized it was one-way going the wrong way. Not that that would have stopped him at this point, but he realized that it had to be the wrong street.

              He took the next left. Up ahead on the right stood the house with puke-green awning, and next to it was Kaz’s house. Lloyd pulled up to the curb, killed the engine and popped the kickstand. He ran across the front lawn and scampered down the steps leading to the basement apartment. A strip of paper taped next to the door-bell read, “Volkov” in a careful style that seemed to be written with a fountain pen.

              Lloyd rang the doorbell and placed his ear on the door. He heard nothing. He rang the bell again, three times in quick succession. Still no answer. Lloyd ran back up the steps and rapped his fist on a window whose ledge was just inches above the flower bed in front of the house.

              A skinny guy in a white tank top and jeans which rode well below his red plaid boxers stepped out on the first floor porch and said, “What the fuck, dude?  Can’t you see nobody’s home?”

              Lloyd looked up at him and said, “Call nine-one-one!” He kicked in the window. “Tell them to send an ambulance.”

              The skinny guy’s eyes widened. He stepped back and said, “What the fuck!”

              Lloyd kicked off a few large shards of glass that hung from the frame’s molding before squeezing through the window, stepping onto a tired cloth couch that was pushed up against the wall.

              “Kaz?” Lloyd called out.

              He heard a moan from the bedroom. Lloyd rushed in. Kaz was lying askew on the bed, drenched in sweat, his cheeks flushed. He appeared to be asleep, breathing heavily.

              “Kaz!”

              Kaz flinched and shielded his eyes with his hand. His fingers were swollen. The skin was peeling off in sheets.

              “Lloyd! You came for me.” Kaz started laughing but the laugh soon turned into a weak wail. “Oh, Lloyd, I forgot to feed the mice. I let you down. I know I let you down.”

              “The mice are fine,” Lloyd said, “just fine.”

              “The secret agent mice. But I like my little composers better.”

              “We’ll give them names if you want,” Lloyd said as he took Kaz’s pulse. The heart rate was over one-sixty. Lloyd felt Kaz’s forehead with the back of his hand. He was warm, but Lloyd couldn’t tell if it was because his skin was flushed or whether he was having a fever.

              “Really?” Kaz said. “You promise? We’ll give them names?”

              “Yeah, but now we’re taking you to the hospital.”

              “I let you down?” Kaz’s eyelids were fluttering. The whites of his eyes were the color of mustard.

              “No, Kaz. You’ve never let me down. Never.”

              “The light hurts my eyes.”

              “It’s okay. Keep them shut.”