Prototype. Part 12

Sometimes he indulged fervid old fantasies, imagining the break in the humdrum that he could bring to the herds who came to feed with firm belief that the day would be a day like all others. How many could he kill in, say, five minutes of forever? He was a man who knew weaponry, who had made it his business, and his hands seemed made to hold it. His fingers and palms fit machine-tooled steel as the hands of pa.s.sionate men fit their lovers. With the compression of one index finger he could awaken them all from their walking comas, and bring home to them the truth of the world, and worlds beyond: All things tend toward entropy.

But not today; not ever. How he had managed to quell such impulses as a younger man remained elusive, but mystery augmented relief; surely some greater process had been at work to stay his trigger finger. Ignorant of his heritage then, and now wiser by extremes, he had a greater purpose, the best kind: one he had created for himself.

A Thursday afternoon; alone, then not. The man who joined Valentine at his table brought with him the scent of a shivering city and breath that smelled of cherry throat lozenges.

"Are you eating today?" Valentine asked him.

The man coughed into his fist and shook his head, eyes red and watery as he tried to smooth his graying, gale-blown hair. He owned, by many accounts, one of the finest minds in a city filled with exceptional minds, but publicly downplayed it well enough. Stanley Wyzkall may have been the director of applied research in MacNealy Biotech's genetics division, but it was possible that rumors were true: His wife was in charge of his wardrobe.

"Something to drink, then?" Valentine asked, and Wyzkall told him a hot coffee would be nice. He left to patronize a Greek vendor, souvlaki for himself and coffee for them both. When he returned he found a fat manila envelope waiting on his side of the table, and it was just like Christmas, six weeks early.

"h.e.l.lo, h.e.l.lo," he said to the envelope, s.n.a.t.c.hing it up. Papers spilled into his hand but gold dust could have been no more welcome. Medical profiles, psychological evaluations, MMPI results, subject's history ... enough to keep him engrossed for hours.

"Quite the unique extended family you've grouped about yourself." Wyzkall honked his nose into a napkin before bringing the coffee to his lips, two-handed.

"And he actually consented to continued observation," said Valentine, still scanning pages. He then crushed them to his chest in the closest thing to glee he could feel. "Maybe there is a G.o.d."

"Mmm. Possibly. But defined by a keen sense of the absurd, wouldn't you say?"

"I wouldn't call it perfection." Valentine stuffed the papers back into the envelope, too much of a temptation - his lunch would grow cold.

"The attending psychologist - Rand is her name - has been in Denver since last weekend. She returned him there herself. She's agreed to file weekly progress reports with Arizona a.s.sociated Labs. Of course I'll have access to these. And this, mmm, this brings up the matter ... the matter of - " He began to clear his throat harshly, at last popping another cherry lozenge and looking so reluctant that Valentine was tempted to just let him squirm.

"The matter of a weekly retainer?" he prompted.

Wyzkall appeared greatly relieved.

"How much?"

"Twenty-five hundred per week seems reasonable."

"Two thousand is the limit at which I'm prepared to keep from being unreasonable." He hunched forward, bringing his face closer to Wyzkall's, every sweeping curve of his skull glistening with intent. And his eyes, cunning eyes, flat eyes that spoke of pain for the sake of expediency, that simmered with the knowledge of families who should be protected from a.s.sa.s.sins unknown. There was no need to say another word.

Because you trust me and I trust you, ethically and legally and in our future goals we have each other by the b.a.l.l.s, but you always keep that little flame of fear of me alive. Because you know what I am inside and there's always the remote chance I may explode in your face. You have dealt with a devil and he pays you well, but the devil can always, always, slip his leash.

"Two thousand will be sufficient."

Valentine settled back into his seat. He bluffed well but would never hurt Wyzkall. You did not hurt the goose that laid the golden eggs; although if you could scare it into s.h.i.tting out a little extra gold now and then, so much the better.

"Drink your coffee, Stanley," he said, "and we'll decide the best way to launder in the new cash flow."

Theirs was a business relationship based on the two primary commodities in the modern world: money and information. Over the past four years, Valentine had paid $20,000 apiece for his own copy of the file on each identified Helverson's syndrome subject. He had an insatiable need to know the limits of the mutation that had marked his own chromosomes; the private sector lab for which Stanley Wyzkall served as research director had an equal need for monetary reserves.

MacNealy Biotech, in addition to its indigenous research projects, was one of numerous labs the world over involved in the Human Genome Project, the inner-s.p.a.ce equivalent of landing the first man on the moon. Discussed in think tanks and on scientific symposia for years, and finally decided to be technologically feasible, the Project was launched in the fall of 1990 with the fifteen-year goal of mapping every strand of human DNA. Each of the three billion nucleotide base pairs, charted. Each chromosome identified, its function labeled.

The resource needs were staggering. Entire supercomputer data banks would have to be constructed to contain the sequenced information. New technologies needed refining to speed up the process of deciphering the protein codes. Human effort was estimated at upwards of 30,000 man-years of labor. And the financial requirements would be almost endless.

Patrick Valentine felt that, in some small way, he was doing his part. Stanley Wyzkall wanted none of the covertly allocated funds for himself, instead insisting they be directed, through foundations that existed only on paper, into MacNealy Biotech.

It all worked out well, and shaped direction in a life that had for its first forty years seemed to him to be absolutely without meaning.

Chicago-born, Chicago-bred, Patrick Valentine had grown up, if not the toughest boy in his surrounding neighborhoods, at least the fiercest. His furies knew no logic, they were just there, so much a part of him that childhood acquaintances who committed no mayhem seemed another species entirely. Life was something to be consumed, not savored, then s.h.i.t out as quickly as possible. Years of turmoil and restless energy and a formless anger had brought him nothing but welts across the back from a distraught father who continually threatened disavowal, and a succession of run-ins with the law.

What a strange, strange lad. What a disappointment. He was educated, but not civilized. He looked in the mirror and saw only the dimmest capacity for greatness, buried in the roughest ore.

Great men must first become great masters of themselves, and connections eventually formed in his mind. The blue uniform that had heretofore meant only trouble gradually took on an air, not of mystique, but of practicality. Here was a channel for his violent exuberance. Here was a job he could love.

The Chicago Police Department was a most unexpected choice to those who knew him.

He applied. He was accepted. He was amazed.

The feel of the baton, the comforting weight of the service revolver ... these became extensions of himself. They were the distillations of potent rage given a vessel to contain it. That he represented law and order was incidental. Far better was that he had been given both a license to inflict controlled miseries upon those whose word could never stand up to his own, and a support system that backed him up when there were doubts. Valentine knew no fatigue when it came to subduing the guilty with bruising ferocity. He was respected by some, reviled by many, and feared by all, but the opinions of others had always been of low priority.

Six years it lasted, this urban bounty of bleeding heads and broken bones, cowering lowlifes and intimidated lovers. Six years before termination for repeated use of excessive force; you really had to be a monster to get the pink slip from this outfit. He tried to take the turn of events philosophically - only so many complaints could be lodged before the scales tilted inevitably against him. He'd had a fine run.

As well, he had long since taken measures to ensure a bonus to his income, a supplement with the potential to far surpa.s.s any paycheck the city of Chicago would ever cut him.

He had found the streets and weedy lots and decayed tenements to be a blue-steel cornucopia. Guns were everywhere, yet it seemed there was no end to the demand - a fine paradox. No gun made it to the evidence room if it could be avoided. Even those that did were occasionally misplaced. Shakedowns of suspects led to confiscations, as easy as picking apples from a tree.

It was a good racket. Investment was nil; the proceeds, 100 percent clear profit. His day job was such that he was in frequent touch with those who made the best customers, and some of them led him to connections greater still. By the time Valentine was fired from the police department, he was already masterminding break-ins at National Guard armories and manufacturer warehouses to truck away heavyweight hauls. Within another three years, he was plugged into an underground pipeline capable of supplying demolitions ordnance, rockets, mines, mortars, nearly everything that dealt a lethal blow short of nuclear.

Eternal demand, infinite supply. He had stumbled upon the one business that remained untouched by the whims of fickle economies. So long as one took precautions to avoid federal scrutiny, it was a seller's market. The groups all but lined up and took numbers: slothful insurrectionists and supremacist militants, international terrorists, private mercenary armies out to create third-world bloodbaths, and, after he had relocated operations to Boston, the IRA.

He took no sides, took only the rewards, but even the money paled beside the hypnotic thrill of tuning in news footage of some trouble spot in the nation or halfway around the world and knowing he might have contributed. Here, the flaming wreckage around a car packed with a quarter ton of plastique; there, the stilled body of some leader cut down by an a.s.sa.s.sination squad. I am there, he would think. He would stare with sated hunger at blood sprays on walls, at churning smoke, at fragments of devastated buildings. Where others saw misery, he saw poetry. Where they mourned senselessness, he recognized the fractal chaos of inevitability.

All things tend toward entropy.

His prayer: Let them burn and let them bleed, but most of all, let them go their way.

Had he believed in the divine at all, Valentine could surely have seen himself as its instrument; but he did not. He was but a man of his world and his times - to an extent a self-made man, but augmented, he came to understand, by deviant biology.

A decade ago, while in his mid-thirties, he had survived another facet of the world's patterned chaos. A malignant tumor had taken root in his s.c.r.o.t.u.m and claimed both t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es before being excised. In the years to follow, while cancer stayed a vanquished foe, the obsessions it had inspired remained. Patrick Valentine could not get enough medical magazines written for the serious layman. Disease was fascinating. Disease was systemic failure that broke down the status quo.

Four years ago he had come across an article on misbegotten chromosomes and their exploitation in the sentencing hearing subsequent to a murder conviction in Texas. The name of Mark Alan Nance sparked dim recollection - a robbery and shooting spree, three days of outlawry in and around Houston. He'd had his fifteen minutes of infamy, then been forgotten by all but those involved.

Don't sentence my client to death, the defense attorney was arguing, because he could be genetically predisposed to commit the crimes for which he's been found guilty. Several months before his rampage, Mark Alan Nance and his wife had been genetically tested to determine why they had conceived a child with severe birth defects, a child that had eventually died. While the abnormalities had been traced to the maternal bloodline, Mark Alan Nance had exhibited an unrelated deformity never suspected, not even known of until two years prior.

It was the first time Valentine had ever heard of Helverson's syndrome.

The article cited comparisons between the defense attorney's wrangling and trials conducted in the late sixties in which reduced sentences were requested for convicted murderers who had double-Y genotypes. Nance's attorney must have done his homework well. Many of the arguments were the same as those of twenty years before. Unhappy case studies of the scant handful of known Helverson's subjects were introduced as evidence.

But in the end, the Texas courts were unforgiving. Death row for Mark Alan Nance.

The arguments in mercy's favor and the portrayal of Nance's miserable life - social malcontent, uncontrolled rages, emotional cripple - rang enough common chords that Valentine began to feel a strange kinship with the convict, loser though the man may be. Above all, though, he had been riveted by the single jailhouse photo accompanying the article.

He looks exactly like I did at his age.

The article had mentioned a certain physical similarity among Helverson's progeny.

It was enough to drive Valentine to a private investigator, paying him well to compile data on the top researchers at MacNealy Biotech, the site of Helverson's original discovery and the primary data bank for its subsequent research. Most looked far too clean to even consider approaching with the kind of offer he was planning. Among them, surely at least one would possess less than bedrock ethical foundations ... but which to choose? One wrong selection and he might never get another.

One of the scientists, however, had a skeleton in an old closet. Stanley Wyzkall had been fined several years before for tax evasion. G.o.d bless greed.

Valentine flew to Boston, where he arranged to meet with a perplexed Dr. Wyzkall, and paved his proposal with an endowment of $50,000. Ample rewards for information, for progress and understanding - what could be more n.o.ble? Discretion would be a.s.sured as well as demanded, particularly for Valentine's own genetic karyotype...

Which confirmed his every suspicion about himself.

Ironic. He had become the oldest identified Helverson's syndrome carrier - the first of a kind, possibly - and remained entirely off-record. Only after their deal was clinched did he stress to Wyzkall just how deep was his need for continued privacy.

"We'll get along beautifully as long as we stick to the simple guidelines I suggested," Valentine told him one day over lunch. "We'll both profit immeasurably." Then from a pocket he removed five pictures and dealt them across the table like a poker hand: Wyzkall himself, then wife, daughter, daughter, son. "But if you ever expose me? Stanley? I'll leave every single hair on your head untouched, but I'll center these other four heads in the crosshairs of a scope on a rifle so powerful there won't even be teeth left."

Valentine slid Wyzkall's own photo over to him, gathered the rest, and returned them to the pocket - patting them - over his heart. The man was speechless, but he had not paled. Admirable.

"Have you read Nietzsche?" Valentine then asked.

"No," Wyzkall murmured.

"He wrote, 'The great epochs of our life come when we gain the courage to rechristen our evil as what is best in us.'" With a frank and humorless smile, "Have courage, Stanley. And enjoy my money as much as I'm going to enjoy learning."

Dealing with the devil was the way Stanley Wyzkall chose to regard it, but Valentine took no offense.

And within two months, the devil decided to move his home and entire operation to the Boston area.

He drove back across the river and was home in Charlestown before the afternoon traffic thickened to its worst.

Valentine settled into his Cape Cod, secured it, checked every room and closet, made sure each room's pistol was where he normally kept it. Once he could breathe again, he eased into the armchair in the living room and did not leave it until he had gone through Clay Palmer's file from beginning to end. He read slowly, carefully, each word not so much comprehended as digested.

Another one to hope for, another in which to invest his dreams of a surrogate guardian. This one, Clay Palmer, would have the attentions of a therapist in these days of self-discovery, but what did doctors really understand? They sought the concrete and quantifiable because as long as they could measure something, it was the easiest way to chart progress. To underlying meanings they gave as little thought as they could get away with.

Clay Palmer would in many respects be the last to know what was important. Left to doctors, he would be told only as much as they thought prudent to let him know, as if it were a privilege and not his right.

Unacceptable.

Late in the night, Valentine repackaged Clay's file and took it into his bedroom, pulled back the rug in the center of the floor. Very solid floors in this house, teak, like the decks of old sailing ships. It made a solid anchor for the floor safe concealed beneath the rug and a removable panel.

He opened the safe and stowed the file, along with the dozen others he'd purchased. There they would spend the night until he awoke the next morning, refreshed, and could retrieve them for some selected photocopying.

When he would find time to make it to the post office was anyone's guess.

Sixteen.

Adrienne only had to spend one night alone in the condo. A month's lease signed, renewable, she had moved in on Friday, and it seemed wrong, all wrong. The task had taken barely an hour. It looked like a home, but that was all. She spent the rest of Friday roaming rooms that had been furnished by someone else, a stranger, and trying to make herself comfortable on furniture that she had not bought. This was like wearing someone else's old jeans and trying to convince herself they fit just as well. She stood at windows overlooking the neighborhood - hedges and lawns and trees - and they looked lifeless. Three years in the desert and she had forgotten the desolate grip of early winter.

Come on, this too shall pa.s.s. This is where I live now.

Sarah arrived mid-afternoon on Sat.u.r.day, having spread the journey over two days. Adrienne was outside to meet her almost as soon as she had stepped from the car, hugged her tightly and they kissed, and Adrienne wanted nothing more than to spend a few hours getting reacquainting with Sarah's wonderfully distracting body. It was under there somewhere, beneath all those clothes.

"I think somebody missed me," she said.

Adrienne squeezed her hand. "Don't let it go to your head."

And the crisp air smelled sweeter, felt for the first time invigorating rather than forbidding, while the sun strained more persistently behind its prison of clouds. The day had gone from vinegar to wine.

"Do you want the grand tour first," said Adrienne, "or are you itching to lug boxes already?"

"Show me, show me." Sarah fell in step beside her, toward the enclosed stairway to the second floor. "I dressed for the state, do I look like I belong here?"

Sarah tramped up the stairs in jeans and soft leather moccasin boots, a heavy knit sweater, and a down vest. She looked as if she'd just stepped from an ad for a ski lodge.

"Everybody's a chameleon," Adrienne told her.

After seeing the condo, Sarah granted approval, adding only that as long as someone else was picking up the tab, why not have gone for someplace with a hot tub as well?

They put off unloading the car until it seemed indecent. Sarah could never travel as lightly as Adrienne; always something she might want, might miss, might long to hold to remind her of another place or time. She packed keepsakes the way alcoholics packed bottles, always in reserve if needed.

Flashbacks came while carrying boxes from the car, a pleasant deja vu of two years ago when the commitment had finally been made between them, the house in Tempe chosen, Adrienne acknowledging, This is no pa.s.sing fling, I love her, this is serious. Friends had shown up that weekend to pitch in, those whom she had gotten to know and love through Sarah. Lesbian couples, mostly, who seemed to form their own extended family, and around whom Adrienne had at first been terribly insecure. Worrying, Will they even accept me? I'm a half-breed. They had, and it really came through that day. Everyone had toted crates and boxes and furniture, had made seats for themselves amid the half-finished jumble. Pa.s.sing pizza and beer, they traded tales of old moves, horror stories of demolished possessions and runaway trucks and wrecked appliances and fires, those ruinous events that seem to grow more fondly hilarious the longer ago they happened. Adrienne found out that day why it is always wise to withhold the beer until the job is completed. It was the first day since leaving San Francisco that she had genuinely felt this new town to be her home, that her soul had taken root and found a sense of community.

Alone this time, just the two of them to share the burdens, though they were few, and she found herself missing the gathering of a tribe.

When they had everything in, Sarah ran for the door one last time. "Back in ten minutes, I swear," then she dashed off. Adrienne heard the car gunning back onto the street.

She began unpacking, sorting by destination: bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, unknown. One box she opened was labeled, in slapdash marker, Thesis Books. Had Sarah at last decided on a subject she would stick with? Adrienne was on her knees, browsing t.i.tles, when Sarah rushed through the doorway with flushed cheeks.

"I couldn't resist." She held up a bottle of wine. "I spotted a package store a few blocks away on Colfax. You want gla.s.ses or are you feeling hardcore today?"

"From the bottle's good," Adrienne murmured, still sorting among the books. This was odd. Given the half dozen or so topics Sarah had been flirting with, none of these books seemed to apply.

"Oh," Sarah said. "You found them."

"I gather you finally committed to something ... but what are these?" Adrienne then dug out Erich Fromm's The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Carl Jung's The Undiscovered Self. "There are some of mine in here."

Sarah had the bottle uncorked and headed out of the kitchen, taking the first pull. "You don't mind, do you?"

"Of course not," accepting the bottle to make the christening of the temporary new home official. She handed it back and went randomly diving for more. "Apocalypse Culture ... The Theory and Practice of Apathy ... Tried as Adults ... Generation X, even? What did you finally decide on?"

Sarah sank down to the floor, opposite Adrienne, over the box. "You won't get mad, will you?"