The Crystal Child (38 page)

There was, of course, no way for her to answer.  Still, if only to placate DeLeon, she bent to examine the cadaver.  It was a lean, leathery mummy, in a better state than the others.  The cheeks were sunken, the skull bald.  Under drooping lids, the blind eyes still stared sleepily out into the world.  Most notably, the brow of the corpse jutted steeply forward to form an extraordinarily heavy ridge over the deeply shadowed eye-sockets.  Seen by itself the head might, at first glance, have been mistaken for that of an ape.  Around the neck there was a necklace that glittered in the light.  Julia bent to study the little piece of jewelry; she could make out an eight-pointed cross and a banner.  “The Royal Order of the Star,” DeLeon explained.  “The count is the most heroic of my collection.  He was a celebrated man of science as well as an illustrious warrior.  His inventions include a water barometer and a remarkably accurate sextant.  But his absolute passion was longevity.  In that field he was willing to be his own guinea pig.  Tried everything.  Fasting, freezing, exotic herbs, fatty alcohols.  The man did not spare himself.  At last he hit upon a technique that kept him alive and kicking at least through the age of one-hundred-and-two.  That was his age when he made the last entry in his journals. But he lived well beyond that.”

“And what was his technique?”

“Fish guts.”  Julia gazed back in bewilderment.  “He ate the raw guts of carp, six ounces of ground viscera per day harvested from the ponds at his estate — Brantôme in the Dordogne.  He undertook the experiment on the hypothesis that there was a substance in the entrails of carp that allowed these remarkable fish to live for centuries.  Indeed, the Calprenède carp are among France’s most prized heirlooms.  There are several in the ponds at Chateau Brantôme today that are known to be over 175 years old. Huge fellows, still in the prime of life.  I know it sounds primitive, but the count’s reasoning was sound.  If carp outlive other creatures so greatly, then there must be something they are metabolizing that gives them that benefit.”

“It’s a wonder he survived at all,” Julia said.  “Fish are loaded with parasites.”

“Which the count apparently found a means to counter.  He filtered the viscera through a barley mold that may have acted as a rudimentary antibiotic.  It’s all in his papers, which I acquired with the corpse.  He made it convincing enough to persuade me to give his diet a try.”

“You’re not serious.”

A laugh loud enough for her to feel across the room exploded from him.  “You see before you a very eccentric man, Doctor.  Indeed, I did follow the Calprenède diet. A heaping serving every day for five weeks.”

“And?”

Again he laughed.  “Very nearly killed me.  Wound up hospitalized for over a month.  You guessed it — the parasites.  I was loaded with them.  So either the count found something better than antibiotics to work with or he was a damned liar.  In any case, there are members of the family who have sworn under oath that the man lived until 1938.”

She offered him a sharply lifted eyebrow.  “I doubt you could convince any skeptical biologist of that.”

“True.  Skepticism is a two-edged blade.  It often destroys the truth as decisively as falsehood.”

“And you acquired the remains … when?”

“In 1981 from the count’s great-great-great grandson, along with his private papers.  The family went to great lengths to preserve the body.  They would never have parted with it voluntarily.  But they had fallen on hard times when I approached them.  Taxes, several bad seasons in the vineyards, that sort of thing.  Even so, they drove a hard bargain.  I would blush to tell you what I paid for the count, but I was determined to have him.  He is the one specimen that offers us a complete nutritional and life-style record.”

“And you take the family’s word for it that these are the remains of a man who lived to be over two-hundred-years old?”

“Two-hundred and twenty-four to be exact.  Yes, I do.  There are ample documents to verify the claim.  More than fifty years of notes by local doctors who attended the count up to the end.  There are also sworn statements from two generations of local clergy.  The count was a loyal son of the church and was seen to attend mass every Sunday for the last eighty years of his life — even when he had to be carried to his pew.  But he was seen, he was seen.  Unfortunately, the count’s descendants did a better job of preserving him after death than the count himself did during his life time.  The years took a terrible toll.  By the time he met his end, he was a physical wreck, barely able to move or speak.  Most of the deterioration you see here set in before his demise.  Poor man!  How he must have suffered in those final years.  He was determined to go the limit, but the accounts say that at the end he welcomed death, even pleaded for it.  A caution to us all.”

“The fate of Tithonus,” she murmured.

“Exactly,” DeLeon agreed.

And what does he expect me to do?
Julia wondered.  Did he want applause?  Was she supposed to endorse his gullibility regarding the cadaver’s age?  Could it be that the best frauds are those who are willing to believe anything?  She smiled politely and looked toward the door.  “Please, Peter, I really am turning to ice.”  And in another moment they were out of the cold room and on their way back to the upper floors.

Behind her as she carefully made her way up the narrow stairs, he said, “At the very least, I hope you appreciate that you have been visiting with the members of a very exclusive club.  No one less than one-hundred and twenty-five admitted to the DeLeon repository — all preserved in a recognizable human condition.”  She could hear the hurt feelings in his voice. 
Oh God, was he going to sulk
?  By the time they reached the downstairs parlor, DeLeon had recovered his composure. “I realize I’m taking a gamble,” he said again as ingratiating as ever.  “But my intuition tells me to keep hunting.”

“For what?”

“The most decisive discovery would be finding the gene that accounts for the Comte La Calprenède’s longevity. Provided, that is, that you accept the fact that he did live as long as reported — which I do.   That would represent incontrovertible proof.  How so?  Because we would not be looking for a human gene, but for the gene of a carp.”

“You expect to find that in his genome?”

“I only say it is a possibility, one among many.  How would it have gotten there?  It may have been conveyed by either a bacterium or a virus that was in the guts of the carp.  That gene was fortuitously incorporated into the count’s DNA.”

Julia stared at him, wondering if he might be joking.  “That’s not possible.”

DeLeon looked back with exaggerated surprise.  “Come now.  Surely you’ve heard of those bunnies that glow in the dark.  Why?  Because they’ve been implanted with a gene from the fire-fly.  Freakish but fascinating.  Similarly, La Calprenède’s may have acquired the longevity of the carp by just such genetic migration.”

“Where recombinant results like that have been accomplished, it’s been by sophisticated laboratory procedures.”

“True, but the great laboratory of nature is older than any human laboratory, is it not?  Bacterial gene-transfer must have happened countless times in our evolutionary past.  Some biologists regard it as the original form of sex.”

She sighed wearily, a signal that he was wearing out her patience.  “I’m sorry, Peter.  It’s all too bizarre for me.  Perhaps it makes some sense, but — really — I’ve left it all behind.  The laboratories, the experiments, the promising paradigms.  I wish you would accept that.  It’s not worth your time trying to convince me of anything.”

“On the contrary.  You are my ace in the hole, my dear.  That’s why I have every reason to see your reputation restored.”  When she looked back puzzled, he continued.  “You are the only hope we have of solving the mystery of Aaron Lacey.  And that will make all the difference, won’t it?  For both of us.  A quantum leap toward M+1.”

***

Her excursion to DeLeon’s repository left her unnerved.  Unable to sleep that night, she took up her copy of Bullfinch and searched through for the myth of Tithonus.  It began as a tale of lust at first sight.  In this case, it was Aurora, the golden goddess of the dawn, who went head over heels for a comely youth named Tithonus.  She loved him so madly she wanted him to share the immortality of the gods — always the beginning of disaster.  She pleaded with Zeus to grant her request, and at last he did.  Unfortunately, Aurora had failed to ask for the gift of youth at the same time, and so Tithonus, though immortal, continued to age without any prospect of dying.  He grew bent and weak and sick, but never sick enough to die.  At last, his plight became so hideous that, like the Comte de La Calprenède — if DeLeon’s story could be believed — he begged for death.  But even when he sought to hang or drown himself, he survived.  Unable to stand the sight of him as he wasted away, Aurora confined him to a dark chamber where he went howling mad with suffering.  Finally, Aurora returned to grant her one-time lover the only mercy she could offer.  She turned him into a grasshopper, whose reedy chirp is the cry of old Tithonus still pleading for death.  Her edition of Bullfinch carried an epigram for the story.  A poem by Tennyson.

As he approached the end of his freshman year, Alex was well on his way to becoming an academic basket case.  His mid-term grades lay before him on his desk, a shameful sight.  He stared at them in black despair.  He was flunking linear programming, statistical mechanics, and American history.   Worse, he was flunking intermediate calculus, a subject he had learned on his own in his junior year of high school.  He had done so poorly in the Fall that he was placed on probation.  If he did not do better this semester, he would be out of school.  His calculus instructor, who had seen his academic records when he was admitted to MIT, took him aside.

“What the hell’s the problem, Alex?” he asked, his tone grumpy and severe.  “These subjects should be a piece of cake for you.  At least the math and science.  I could understand about the history. You shouldn’t be asked to waste time on stuff like that.  But your records and your test scores make you out to be a quasi-genius.  You’re not going to embarrass us all, are you?  Jesus, you aren’t even showing up for your swimming classes.”

Alex could not look him in the eye.  “I’ve had things on my mind.”

“I gather they don’t include your professional future.”

“No, they don’t.”  He muttered the words defiantly.

“Then … ?”

“It’s a family matter.”

The instructor knew something about Alex’s background.  The more sensational aspects of Julia’s case had made the newspapers across the country just a few years before.  He decided to back off.  “Look, maybe you need to take some time off.  We could give you incompletes, let you have some time to yourself.  We don’t want to lose you.”

Alex would have liked to say yes.  “My father wouldn’t go along with that.  I wouldn’t want it either.”

“Why not?  What have you got to lose?  A year off could do you a lot of good.”

“No, it wouldn’t.   Not if I have to live at home.”

Living at home meant living with his father, and that was out of the question.  He had been through that.  Following Julia’s trial, Jake had insisted that he drop out of high school and spend the next few months — a full year, as it turned out — recovering from the trauma of events.  During that time, Jake, now chronically self-pitying and irredeemably furious, resigned from his firm in San Francisco, vacated the family home, and relocated to Los Angeles.  This was supposedly Jake’s way of protecting his son and making a “fresh start.”  For Alex, it was hell.  At home, he and Jake alternated between sullen non-communication and bitter arguments.  From the time they moved into their new Los Angeles home — a lavish hilltop house in the Pacific Palisades that was far too big for two people — his father refused to speak of Julia; he would not have her mentioned in his presence.  That hostile, hate-filled lacuna in his life was more than Alex could bear.  Did Jake really intend to cut him off from his mother, even after she had been punished?  He could understand his father’s anger and dismay, but not his willingness to abandon Julia, to cast her out of his life.  He imagined what torment prison must be for Julia.  It was wrong for him to make his son a party to such vindictive cruelty.

For days at a time, Alex holed up in his room, wasting his hours, neglecting school work, watching videos that were of no real interest to him.  Trying to blot out his anxieties, he took to smoking pot, not bothering to hide the habit from his father.  When Jake brought the matter up, he lashed out, “So why don’t you call the cops and have me arrested?  That’ll do wonders for your reputation.  Pervert wife, hophead kid.”  His response to Jake’s scolding was to smoke still more, until he sensed the weed was dulling his mind, fraying his synapses.  That was too high a price to pay.  He needed his mind to think his way out of the trap he was in, to lay plans for the future when he could escape from Jake.

Though he occasionally dabbled at a few computer programs he was developing just to keep in shape, his grades suffered through his last year of high school.  Still his academic record was strong enough to let him graduate with honors.  Though he would not admit it, his poor performance in his last year of high school was a cry for help. He was a bright boy falling behind. He wanted everybody to know that, especially his father.  As if to let the world know how gifted he was, in his senior year he tossed off superbly high SAT scores in a fit of rebellious anger and then insisted to his teachers that he had no interest in going to college.  Those who knew his story attributed his erratic behavior to the misfortune his errant mother had put him through.

A few times, when he worked up the courage, Alex did ask Jake about his mother.  He met a stone wall.  “For God’s sake, what is there to say?” Jake had shouted in one of their climactic encounters.  “Your mother is where she belongs.  Behind bars.  She’s a sex offender.”

Alex stared at his father helplessly.  “She is not.  Don’t say that!”

“What do you call raping a child?”

“She didn’t rape him.”

“No?  I have an eye-witness who says she did.”

“It wasn’t her fault.  It was that kid.”

“That’s your idea of morality?  Blame the victim?”

“He isn’t the victim.  She is.”

“That makes no sense at all,” Jake insisted.

But Alex knew it did — somehow.  He could not put what he felt into words, but he knew Aaron was some kind of malevolent force, an uncanny presence that had overwhelmed his mother and turned her into another person.  Alex saw her as swept away in a raging river, flailing, drowning.  But he finally realized how useless it was to appeal to Jake for understanding.  His father could not get beyond the humiliation Julia had inflicted upon him.  “She ruined me,” he lamented more than once.  He had given up his practice, his home, his friends.  “I did this for you,” he liked to tell Alex.  But that was not true.  He had done it out of hatred.  He was determined to make his break with Julia final and to do all he could to make Alex part of that decision.  In Alex’s last year of high school Jake, without asking, made arrangements to enroll Alex in a distant university.  His choice was MIT.  Alex would be sent there like it or not.  He expected Alex to protest, but Alex accepted Jake’s decision almost gleefully.  He was even more eager than his father to go far away, to be on his own, to make his own plans.  Still there were details they quarreled over.

“I’m adding an additional credit card for you,” Jake informed him.  “You can put a thousand a month on it.”

“I don’t want it if you’re going to pay.  I don’t want you keeping tabs on me.”

“That’s not the point.”

“I think it is.  If you want, you can send me a check for the thousand.  I’ll handle my own payments.”

Jake quickly gave up the argument, agreeing to let Alex disentangle his bank account and credit card from his own.  He suspected this was part of a plan to contact Julia, but he was sure Alex would never find her.  He had tried to do that himself through one of the private investigators his firm used — simply to know where she might be, the better to guard against meeting her.  The investigator came up blank.  “Either she has friends you don’t know,” the detective reported, “or she’s skipped the country.”

***

Forrester reached back in his memory, trying to recall the last time he had met Julia’s son.  He remembered him as a gangly, reticent teenager who had once showed up at a dinner party at the Stein house.  That must have been five or six years ago.  The boy had sat through the dinner politely, saying little but seeming generally intelligent.  Forrester could not recall if he and Alex had spoken to one another.  He knew Alex was a computer prodigy, but he and the boy would not have found much to say on that subject.  Perhaps they had made some small talk that evening.  He remembered that before dessert was served, Alex had excused himself to go off with friends.  He knew Julia was proud of her son; she once said he was brilliant, but that was a mother’s opinion.  In any case, he must be in college by this time.  But right now he was waiting at the reception desk at GT International.  Forrester had no doubt he had come to ask about Julia.  He would have preferred to avoid the meeting, but this was, after all, Julia’s son.  Forrester did not wish to be unfeeling with the boy, but he had no idea what he would tell him.

“You’re in college?”  Forrester asked, feeling his way forward. “Where?”

“MIT,” Alex answered.  He had an athletic air about him, broad-shouldered, big-boned, tall enough to be a basketball player.  He had a sharp, smart look with clear eyes and a sensitive brow.  He was doing his best to look composed but Forrester could tell he was jittery.  His leg was visibly trembling.

“And, let’s see, you’re in …?”

“Pardon.”

“What field?”

“Oh.  Math. Math and computer science.”

“Maybe you’d like to see our computer set-up here at the lab.  It’s supposed to be state-of-the-art.  I wouldn’t know.  I use it, but my computer literacy is an inch deep.” Alex showed no interest in the proposal.  Forrester asked, “Shouldn’t you be in school now?”

“I took the semester off.”

Okay, let’s get down to it,
Forrester thought. “To look for your mother?”  Alex gave a startled response as if Forrester had guessed a secret.  “Well, why else would you be here?”

“Yes.  To look for her.”

“Have you done this before?  Taken off to search for your mother?”

“Yes.  A few times.”

“I suppose you’ve already talked to her sister in Texas and other relatives.”

“Yes.”

“And John Briggs her lawyer?”

“Yes.”

“Does your father know you’re here?”

“No.  But what does that matter?”  There was a note of irritation in the answer.

“Do you think your father would approve of your seeing her again?”

There was a long pause.  Then Alex said with a measured directness that impressed Forrester, “I don’t really care.  My father is completely irrational about what’s happened. I shouldn’t have to ask his permission to see my mother.”

Forrester agreed.  “Yes, I suppose that’s up to you.”

The boy was giving Forrester a straight, hard look as if to say
You owe me the truth.
  Aloud he said, “You know where she is, don’t you?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because otherwise you’d simply tell me you couldn’t help me and that would settle it.”

“Sorry to say that’s what I
am
going to tell you.  That’s what I told a private detective your father sent around last year.”

Alex eyes widened.  “Really?  He hired a detective?”

“He did.  I blew him off in less than ten minutes.  ‘No idea where Julia Stein is.’  That’s what I told him.  It’s also what I told the police when they came to see me six months ago.  That wasn’t a pleasant meeting.  For all I know, they’re still watching me.  You do understand: if I were in touch with her, that would be a crime.”

“It would?”

“Your mother broke her parole.  She’s a fugitive.  Good citizens are supposed to turn in parole violators, not cover up for them.”

Alex glowered at him.  “You wouldn’t turn her in.  She always liked you.  She said you used to be good friends in med school.”

Forrester nodded agreement.  “No, I wouldn’t turn her in.”

“But even if you know where she is, you won’t tell, is that it?”

“Fortunately I don’t know.  She hasn’t been in touch.”

Alex hung his head for a moment, then looked up.  “It’s important to me.  You can’t just lose your mother like this, in such a lousy way.  It’s rotten what my father did.  Maybe she needs help.  She’s got no money, no friends.”

“She’s a very capable woman.  I’m sure she’s done what seems best to her, wherever she’s gone.”

“She might be with him.  Do you think she is?”

“Aaron Lacey?  I have no idea.  I don’t know where he is either.”

Alex rubbed at his forehead, a dark worried expression on his face.  “I hate to think she’s with him.”  He stared into Forrester’s face like someone who needed a friend to confide in.  “I don’t want her to think I’ve rejected her.  I did once, at first.  I was jealous.  But then every time I thought of her in prison, I just broke down.  I couldn’t stand that.  There’s a lot I don’t understand, but she and I were friends, not just mother and son.   She was good.  She is good.  Maybe that’s why she ran away — because she thinks I hate her. But I don’t. If she knew how I felt, she’d come back, I’m sure.”

His words took hold of Forrester.  That might be true.  Alex might be able to entice Julia back to the United States.  He remained haunted by the sense that he had abandoned her to DeLeon, a ruthless opportunist who seemed capable of doing anything.  “Alex,” he said steeling himself to lie one last time, “I wish I could help you, but I can’t.”  He tried to make the remark sound sympathetic but impatient, as if the meeting had come to an end.  Alex nodded his assent and rose to leave.

“Did you drive here?” Forrester asked.

“Yes.”

“Let me walk you to your car.  If we go this way, you can see some of the lab.”  But Alex was even less interested in seeing the lab than Forrester was in showing him around.  They were soon out of the building and in the parking lot.  Alex, on the brink of tears, was eager to have Forrester walk away.  But Forrester kept standing there as Alex unlocked the door of his car.  When he was inside, Forrester leaned into the car to say, “There’s a restaurant in the city, on Fillmore.   It’s called O. Henry’s.  Can you find your way there?”

Alex frowned his bewilderment.  “Sure, I guess.”

“It has booths.  I’ll reserve one for tonight.  I’ll use your name.  Eight-thirty. Be there.”  Alex continued frowning.  He was not interested in a dinner invitation and was on the point of saying so when Forrester suddenly bent closer.  “I told you the police came to see me.  That leaves you a little paranoid.  I have more to tell you, but not in the office.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“Be there.  Eight-thirty.”

“Sure.”

***

Alex arrived first at the restaurant and claimed the reservation.  The waiter led him to a curtained booth at the rear.  It was as secluded a place as one might expect to find outside of a private home, but the very furtiveness with which Forrester had surrounded their meeting left Alex more anxious than he anticipated.  Was Forrester actually being watched by the police?  If so, that must mean he knew more than he had yet mentioned.  When Forrester arrived, Alex made it clear he had no interest in dining.  He had questions to ask.  When the waiter came, Forrester turned in a perfunctory order.