Cast Of Shadows Page 7

  There weren’t many targets in the small towns surrounding Harold’s ranch. Mickey was here on a social visit. Through his Web site, Byron collected donations for anti-clone “lobbying,” and he quietly dispersed much of it to several individuals and churches that spread the word about the evils of modern science. The Hands of God was one of them. This had brought the Hands of God to the attention of the FBI, which had already seen the group’s name on several threats to fertility clinics around the country. Phil and the others denied they had ever threatened anyone, and none of the threats bore an Ohio postmark. The feds didn’t know about Mickey the Gerund and the long box in the back of his Cutlass Supreme.

  “I can’t tell you how happy I am to have you here for a few days, Mickey,” Harold said. “You are a true instrument of the Lord.”

  “Thank you, Harold,” Mickey said. “It’s nice to have a place to lie low and to get some genuine rest. When I went to bed last night I was sure I could have slept long into this evening.”

  Harold was an odd-shaped man, with narrow shoulders and legs as yellow and brittle-looking as dried straw. In between, he had a large round belly that looked like an errant pregnancy or a gym ball. In the yard, Harold’s children played on an expensive mahogany swing set. Mickey had been here three days and wasn’t even sure how many kids the man had. At least four. Harold’s third wife was in the kitchen someplace. She was young and pretty because Harold was wealthy and famous, having once been on the cover of The New York Times Magazine. Mickey didn’t like to imagine them having sex, but he couldn’t help himself – another of God’s contradictions, and a cruel one. Through the window blinds looking into Harold’s office from the porch, Mickey could see a counter that kept track of the visitors to Harold’s Web site. The number was in the millions (Mickey didn’t know when Harold had started counting) and it clicked off another every few seconds. People were buying Harold’s message at the same rate they were buying hamburgers, Mickey thought.

  “What’s the latest in Washington?” Mickey asked Harold, who kept pace with such things.

  “Nothing,” Harold said. When he lifted his glass to his lips, a ring of condensation remained on his T-shirt at the summit of his belly. “Cloning’s not even on Congress’s agenda this session. They don’t want to touch it. The less they have to acknowledge the issue, the better, as far as they’re concerned.”

  “Same old same old, huh?” Mickey said.

  Harold’s blue-gray beard pinched the area around his lips as he puckered them. “Don’t get me wrong. I love this country and I believe in democracy. But there are some issues, hard issues, that elected representatives are ill-equipped to deal with. They are controversy-averse, and our enemies use that to their advantage. There’s an old axiom in the Capitol: That which is legal tends to stay legal; that which is outlawed tends to stay outlawed. Once something like cloning is legal, the government is likely to keep it that way just so they don’t have to talk about it ahead of the election. Whatever they say is going to piss off half the people.”

  “More than half the people agree with us, Harold,” Mickey said. “I saw a poll the other day-”

  “I don’t need to see the polls,” Harold said. “I just talk to my friends and neighbors. There’s nobody divided on the issue around here. If our sonofabitch congressman had to vote on the cloning amendment, and he voted against it, we’d kick his ass out and he knows it. But the other side votes with dollars, and all they need to do is keep the amendment off the schedule. Cloning interests are happy, congressmen are happy, and now it’s two against one, with the American people getting the shaft.”

  “It’s a shame all right.”

  “You know I have a standing offer to debate any senator or representative on the other side, and do you know how many have taken me up on it? Zero. Sure, I go on the talk shows every now and again, but they put me up against people who don’t matter: college professors and feminists. What does being a feminist have to do with making clones? Can you tell me that?”

  Mickey sucked some tart residue from an oblong ice cube in his glass. “Reproductive freedom. They say cloning is a necessary part of a woman’s right to choose. It frees them from the shackles of their uteri, blah, blah, blah.”

  “That proves my point!” Harold was excited now. “Cloning was discovered and perfected by man just a few years ago. How can it be necessary? These liberals have been ridiculing the Bible for years, but then science figures out how to make a human being from a man’s rib – literally! – and they claim it as a momentous and necessary advance in the evolution of species. Ridiculous. It’s dangerous, is what it is. It’s not even man playing God – it’s man taunting God. But God has the last word because man might be able to make man in man’s image, but only God can make man in God’s image. Only God can forge a soul.”

  “Amen,” Mickey said, clutching a few mixed nuts from a bowl between them.

  Harold breathed loudly through his mask of hair. “So where are you headed next?”

  The children shouted something and whinnied and chased each other around the back of the house. “I don’t think you want to know the answer to that.”

  Harold laughed. “You’re right, I don’t. Just do me a favor and keep your business out of this county. There aren’t many legitimate targets here anyway, except for the university, I guess, but if some shit goes down in my backyard the feds will be up my ass again in a heartbeat.”

  Mickey nodded. “Harold, you got a three-hundred-mile halo around you as far as I’m concerned. Don’t you worry about it.”

  “A three-hundred-mile halo.” Harold tried to picture such a thing. “Who was that preacher out West that tried to build the nine-hundred-foot Jesus?”

  “Oral Roberts.”

  “Yeah, Roberts. A nine-hundred-foot Jesus and a three-hundred-mile halo.” He laughed.

  That was the last they said for a long while, until Harold’s wife called them for supper. Four days later, outside a private research facility in Arkansas, Mickey shot a laboratory technician in the back of the head as he went to lunch. The technician died on the scene.

  The Little Rock police passed around a sketch of Byron Bonavita.

  Justin at Three

  – 16 -

  On a hot private Michigan beach no bigger than a city driveway, Terry and Martha Finn made attentive barriers of themselves as Justin played between them. Up a steep and uneven staircase of railroad ties was the cottage – or what they called the cottage, anyway. Most would call it a damn nice second home, with three big bedrooms and all new appliances and ceiling fans mounted up high, in silent rotation – more for psychological effect than anything else. In an hour, Gary and Jennifer Hogan and their daughter, Mary Ann, would arrive for the holiday weekend. Saturday and Sunday would pass on the boat and on the mahogany deck with adult conversation and lots of drinking, the grown-ups periodically rescuing the kids from boredom with a story or a game or a silly face.

  “So who do you think the guy was?” Terry asked his wife, sticking his lower lip out at a blue plastic dinosaur, which Justin had lifted in front of his face.

  “Who?”

  Terry nodded at their son. “Him. The guy.”

  “Oh, stop it.”

  “Seriously.”

  “They can’t tell us. It’s against the law. No use worrying about it.”

  “It’s against the law for New Tech to tell us. It’s not against the law for us to find out. You know. Hire a private detective or something.”

  “Stop.” She laughed.

  “There’s gotta be a paper trail somewhere. Once he grows up, hell, you could throw his picture out there and somebody might recognize him. The donor was alive after cloning became legal, so he could only be dead a couple years.”

  “Right.”

  “There’s this, too.” Terry lifted the back of Justin’s T-shirt, exposing a birthmark near his left hip that looked a little like West Virginia, or a long-spouted teapot. Without looking, Justin absently swatted
at his father’s hand and Terry let go.

  Martha smiled and, tired of squinting at the sun reflecting off the lake, closed her eyes.

  “He swears a lot.”

  “Who?”

  “Justin.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “He does. Don’t you think? For a three-year-old.”

  “Well, stop swearing around him,” Martha said.

  “I don’t.”

  “You just did.”

  “When?”

  “Ten seconds ago. You said h-e-l-l.”

  “That’s not swearing. I’m talking about a real potty mouth.”

  “They’re just words to him. Funny sounds.”

  Terry watched his son dig trenches in the sand with the tail of a tyrannosaur. “Do you ever wonder if some of the guy’s memories – the donor I’m talking about now – if some of his memories might be in Justin’s genes?”

  “What? Like Jung?”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Carl Jung. The collective unconscious.”

  Terry molded his face into a half-serious sneer, the way he often did when Martha’s total recall of her college notebooks threatened him with a tangent. “This morning, Justin got hold of this knife-”

  “A knife?”

  “A plastic one. It was in the bag with the bagels.”

  “Oh.”

  “Anyway, he was pretending to cut with it, against the tablecloth, and he looked sort of like he knew what he was doing.”

  “From watching you cut the bagels, probably.”

  “No, he was holding it like a scalpel. Long, smooth incisions. Like a surgeon.”

  “Give me a break.”

  “I know. It’s silly. I’m just saying. Suppose we found out he had been a doctor. That would be a kick, wouldn’t it?”

  “I suppose he learned to swear on the golf course, then.” Martha grinned.

  The joke was funny, but Terry didn’t laugh. Martha was always dismissing him, tossing aside every decent idea he proposed. He had once admired her because she was smart, but he didn’t realize that with intelligence would come condescension. He was the one who worked, the one who paid for the two homes and the two cars and the expensive vacations with his fat commissions as a futures trader, but he hadn’t been a great student, and Martha, who thought smarts were an end in themselves, never offered him the respect he deserved. Now they had a child together and the child was obviously bright and she acted like Justin got that from her side, even though she hadn’t passed a single one of her supersmart genes to him. If for no other reason, he wanted to find out where the boy came from to remind her that Justin’s brains didn’t come from her.

  “So what do you think?”

  “About what?”

  “About having a guy check into Justin’s past.”

  “He’s three, Terry. He doesn’t have a past.”

  “Okay. The other guy. The other him.”

  “They’re completely different people. He’ll get more of his personality from us than he will from some mystery man.”

  “Dr. Moore said they were like twins, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “You know how twins sometimes have, like, ESP? What if Justin’s still got some memory of his twin? Through ESP.”

  “You got all of this because Justin said the S -word last night?”

  “Not just that.”

  She tossed her strawberry highlights away from her mouth and grinned at him. Her skin glistened and her teeth shined. She looked out-of-the-package new. “Go ahead. I don’t care. You’ve still got your own credit card. I’d rather have you spend it on this than a girlfriend or something.”

  “Cheat on you? Never.”

  With Justin between them, they shared a sandy kiss.

  “Ass-word! Ass-word! Ass-word!” Justin chanted.

  Their faces stretched into grins and, lips never parting, they started the kiss again from the beginning.

  – 17 -

  There were piles of M amp;M’s in little dishes, and lace patterns pressed for display under the glass coffee tabletop. There were yards and yards of bookshelves along the walls, but on them no books. The room was surrounded instead by ceramic animals, porcelain figures, wood frames, acrylic doodads, glass vases, scented candles, and assorted whatnots. Facing east, the room was bright, and Barwick had chosen a chair – a green one with high arms and a buttoned back, upholstered in unidentifiable fabric – that pointed her away from the window. Mrs. Lundquist sat directly in the sun’s light, causing Barwick to be curious about the older woman’s fair, preserved skin, which contrasted so drastically with her own mocha complexion.

  “You were telling me about this oral history you were doing,” she said.

  “Right, right,” Barwick said. “For the university.”

  “Syracuse?” she asked. “SU?”

  “No,” Barwick said. “University of” – she thought she might be giving something away, but then decided what the hell – “Chicago.”

  “Hmmm,” she said. “I see.”

  “We’re going around the country, selecting people at random, and getting them to tell us their stories. These tapes will be transcribed and filed for the benefit of – you know – future generations.”

  “Sounds like interesting work.”

  “Oh, it is. It is. I get to meet a lot of nice people. Like you.” She smiled abruptly, charmingly. “You see, history has always been told through the lives of extraordinary people. Presidents and world leaders, generals, what have you. But the really good stuff, the genuine article, is in the everyday. Did you know that we don’t have a good first-person account of what it was like for an average person who lived in ancient Rome?”

  “No, I certainly didn’t,” she said.

  Neither did Barwick. She was making it up. “Oh, we know what the battles were like, and what went on in the Senate. And we have their myths. And plays.” Were there Roman playwrights? There were Greek ones, for sure. She should have used the Greeks as an example. “But we don’t have the everyday stuff.”

  “Well, what can I do for you?”

  “If it’s not too big an imposition, I’d just like to have a chat. Ask a few questions. Have a conversation. Then I’ll go, and you’ll never see me again. Although you will get a fifty-dollar check from the university.” She wondered how she would get a University of Chicago check. “Or from our grant office, anyway.” That sounded easier to fake.

  “Sounds lovely,” Mrs. Lundquist said, and it occurred to Barwick that this could be a case study of why old people made such easy marks for scam artists and grifters. She wasn’t here to con the lady, though. Not really. This was legitimate business.

  Barwick burned the first disc discussing life in Watertown, New York. Mrs. Lundquist liked to walk when the weather was fair, so every evening she wrote a letter to a friend or a relative and the next morning she walked it to the post office. She’d sometimes stop by Great American and pick up groceries, just a bagful, but in six days or so, she’d accumulate two weeks’ worth. On Wednesdays, a man from the store named Harvey delivered bags too heavy for her to carry.

  By disc two, they were on to family.

  Her husband died last year of heart disease. She had three sons, one who had moved west to Buffalo, another who’d settled south in Atlanta, and the youngest was killed in a skiing accident about nine years ago. That was the one Barwick had come to hear about. But she was patient. There wasn’t any reason to rush her.

  “What happened to Eric was a horrible thing,” Mrs. Lundquist said. “But it was an accident. Eric was a fantastic skier. Fantastic.”

  “What did Eric do?”

  “What did he do? When he died, he was still a student. A senior at Cornell. He was interested in social service. He was always trying to save people, involved in those campus protests, peaceful ones. He thought about the Peace Corps, or teaching in the inner city. Don and I thought he’d end up a guidance counselor. He was a very good listener. So
smart.”

  “Do you have any pictures of Eric?” Barwick asked. “Any of your kids, I mean. Just to put names to faces.”

  Mrs. Lundquist’s face glowed like filament. “Of course.”

  The Finns hadn’t asked for pictures. In fact, they’d specifically told Big Rob they didn’t want to see any photos of Eric Lundquist, and that was passed on when the assignment was handed off to Barwick. They didn’t want to know what Justin would look like as a teen, or as an adult. But Barwick wanted to see. She had never met a clone before. She wanted the thrill of looking into a photograph and seeing the grown-up face of this baby boy, photos of whom she had in the glove compartment of her rental car out front.

  Mrs. Lundquist, still spry, was up the stairs and down in less than a minute. On her return, she had three faux-leather-bound three-ring albums in her hands. Barwick moved to the couch and they propped the albums open across their laps. The Lundquist boys were all handsome – tall, blond, broad-shouldered, thin-waisted, with beautiful hands and sculpted legs. She particularly noticed Eric’s softball-sized calves. Even from photos, she could see that Eric was special. Barwick tried to recall her high school days (not so long ago, she told herself), and yeah, she’d have had a crush on Eric. Her friends and she would have made him the stuff of phone gossip. They would have memorized his class schedule. They would have secretly hated his girlfriend.

  “Did Eric have a girlfriend?”

  Mrs. Lundquist smiled. “He was shy, but very popular with girls. Did you know he was a lifeguard at Lynde Lake? I’m sorry. Of course you didn’t. In high school, he dated the student council president. She was a lovely girl, Glynnis. I still have lunch with her mother once a week. Do you know that Glynnis is a broker on Wall Street now?”