The Cunningham Equations Page 7

  “How come?”

  Helen shrugged and looked away. “I was curious.”

  “About what?”

  “Just things.” She waved her hand. “You know, Alfie’s been acting peculiar lately. Sometimes I get strange answers.”

  Blaise considered saying Like what? But apparently the answers weren’t embarrassing. Digging might dislodge a snake instead of a worm. “It’s a growing stage with computers. I’ll fix it. Can you remember enough to answer some questions?”

  “I can try.” Helen poked apathetically at her village salad, trying to drain oil off a lettuce leaf.

  “Do you want something else to drink?” Blaise hoped she’d say yes. He was struggling to stay dry and one beer stoked the fire instead of quenching it.

  Helen shook her head, swirling blond hair around her face. “What do you want to know?”

  “Who owns GENRECT? What’s the financial situation? Where does Gregory West fit in?”

  “They’re part of the same answer, Blaise. After Dr. Hemmett and Jules Gross set GENRECT up as a private company, controlling interest was purchased by a group from a venture capital company in San Francisco called Tenro. Gregory West runs Tenro.”

  “Do you know who the investors are?”

  “No. It’s like a blind trust. Tenro is at risk, not the limited investors. So most dealings are executed by Mr. West on behalf of the investors.”

  “A handy way to stay out of the news,” Blaise guessed. Helen nodded. “Those arrangements are made to launder money just to keep the public in the dark.” She spread a piece of lettuce and looked at it with distaste. “Do you like fat girls?”

  “I don’t know. I never thought about it.” Caught unawares, the question startled him. “You’re not fat.”

  “If I eat anything except this lettuce I’ll swell up like a kielbasa.” She murmured in another language, then said, “You aren’t what you don’t eat. My parents were Polish.”

  “McIntyre?”

  Helen’s smile was wry. “The immigration agent was Irish.”

  “Poles make good vodka,” Blaise said reassuringly. “When I was a girl I loved dumplings and ribs.” Helen had a faraway look that Blaise supposed meant the lettuce leaf would wilt on her fork before she ate it. “It was a Katowice recipe.”

  “Helen,” Blaise said. “Please!”

  “I’ll bet you don’t like fat girls.” She jabbed the lettuce leaf in her mouth.

  “I love them. How about West?”

  “Is he fat?”

  “Helen!”

  “He has more than just the controlling interest. GENRECT was never a public offering so SEC rules allow a great deal of privacy. Hemmett’s original partner got out while the getting was good. Dr. Gross is in Israel improving ruminant digestion for more efficient milk production.

  “Dr. Hemmett stayed on as manager. As a founder, he lends an aura of authenticity. But GENRECT has not released a single product in three years. The backers are digging into their own pockets to keep it afloat.”

  “You’re saying nobody will buy GENRECT stock?”

  “No insider. And to go public will only accelerate the disaster. GENRECT’s price is holding because they all went in at inflated prices and stand to take a bath if they bail out now. So they just hang on and pray.”

  “What kind of losses would they take, Helen?”

  Helen studied her fork, as if looking at a ledger sheet. “When GENRECT went on the market, biotech stocks were all new, speculative, no earnings record. The biggest projected uses were in medicine and agriculture. Neither market is likely to disappear. So biotech sold at forty times earnings. Projected incomes were way too high. At least in the short term.”

  “Projected?”

  Helen bobbed her head.

  “And in its three years of existence GENRECT has never earned a dime?”

  “That’s right, Blaise. GENRECT is just another GENENTECH coat-tailer. Except with zero earnings.”

  “Is West interfering in company management?”

  “That’s his job: Salvage what he can for Tenro.”

  “Eat your salad,” he said. “It’s good for what ails you.” Dobie seemed relieved when they came back. He licked Helen. For Blaise the dog had only reproach.

  The ride to Helen’s house was tightly quiet. Helen promised to check up on Tenro. Blaise had not told her that he was looking for Gordon. Or that he supposed West was the man most likely to have sent Gordon into hiding while he accelerated his project. Helen didn’t conceal her unhappiness at his secrecy.

  “Thanks for lunch.” She closed the VW door with force. “You’re welcome.”

  Helen clung to the door and Blaise knew he was going to hear more than he wanted to.

  “What’s an m and m, Blaise? A modified mink?”

  “A coat? I don’t know.”

  “That’s strange. Students were gossiping outside your classroom about your new m and m. I don’t think they were talking about candy or a coat.” Blaise sat glum, knowing his only salvation lay in silence.

  Dobie cried. Helen turned toward the car with longing before ducking her head and hurrying into the house.

  Blaise wondered if she regretted leaving the dog or him. He patted the passenger seat and Dobie came over the back to sit staring at Helen’s door.

  “I guess you’re stuck with me, Dobie.”

  The dog looked at Blaise. Dobie was not happy.

  Helen had given Blaise the number of a financial columnist. “He’s a cross between Dear Abby and Louella Parsons,” she had said, “for people who stick real money into funny stock. Gossip about whom not to trust—practically everyone—plus tea and sympathy for the bum cases.” Blaise caught Morgan on the first ring. The columnist was cordial, as Helen had warned. Without sources, Morgan would have nothing to print.

  Blaise affirmed that GENRECT remained landlocked between the more publicized and glamorous Salk Institute and UCSD, that he, the Nobel Prize winner, did indeed work for dear old Arthur Hemmett, who had once plied Morgan with liquor and promises.

  Morgan sighed. “It’s time I did a column about goings-on at GENRECT.” Blaise suspected the sigh was for freebie booze. In return for Blaise’s promise to let him know how the search for information on West came out, Morgan suggested that Blaise talk to a winemaker in Escondido.

  Blaise thanked Morgan with vague promises, including exclusive rights to his life story.

  Snapping the off switch on the cordless telephone triggered restlessness. Blaise wanted to do something. He missed Gordon’s steadying influence, the assurance that whatever was happening to him would work out for the best.

  In the bathroom he dropped his clothes in a heap. His breathing came hard again. Anxiety, Gordon said. The shower drummed as Blaise alternated hot and cold, sending sharp jolts through the nervous system. The mirror fogged up so he couldn’t see himself. He thought fleetingly of vampires as he dressed in a blue chambray shirt and gray slacks.

  Gordon owned a modest house in better repair than Blaise’s, with an immaculate coat of rust red Dutch Boy gloss white trim. Only the lawn, two weeks overdue for mowing, betrayed the absence of its compulsively neat owner. Blaise approached the front door and pressed the button. He waited and tried again.

  No answer.

  Black and tan as an Irish nightmare, Dobie leaped through the car window and whizzed past Blaise. “Know where you are, boy?”

  Dobie whined and wouldn’t follow Blaise away from the house.

  “Let’s go, Dobie. The door’s locked.”

  The dog lurched toward Blaise and an instant later he felt the needle sharpness of Dobie’s teeth. Without letting his hand go, Dobie dragged Blaise back to the door. He shoved Blaise toward the bulky green mailbox next to the door.

  The dog stood expectantly, at attention.

  Shrugging, Blaise opened the mailbox and looked in. Letters and junk mail cluttered the interior.

  Dobie whined.

  Blaise examined the box again and
Dobie stopped whining. He put his hand on the metal front and the dog barked twice. “Once for no and twice for yes, Dobie? Is that what Gordon’s been teaching you?”

  Dobie barked twice again.

  They looked each other in the eye and Blaise took his hand off the box. Dobie gave a single disappointed yip. Blaise put his hand back on the letter box. Two barks.

  He felt under the box and found the magnetized key holder that most people used for cars.

  Dobie tore through the house, frantically yipping. After a while he came back out to lay on the stoop.

  “No one home?”

  The dog cocked his eyebrows so he could see Blaise without lifting his head.

  “Come on, Dobie.”

  Blaise looked back when he was getting into the yellow VW. Like Gordon’s lab, the house was immaculate to the point of madness, and just as lonely.

  Visiting Gordon’s home had been enough to make Blaise dig a bottle of gin out of a closet.

  Millions of termites inside the beams of his house were holding hands to keep his home from sliding into the sea.

  The termites had formed an accusing circle around him. “You were supposed to deliver that lecture ” the queen mother said. “You were supposed to drive. If you’d held your liquor like a man they’d still be alive.”

  “Still competing,” the worker termites chorused.

  “Blaise! Wake up!”

  Linda was shaking him, her face and lips inches away. He caught her waist and pulled her down. She yelled as he slid his hands under her clothes and started stroking satiny skin. After a while she stopped yelling.

  Blaise woke again when Linda was returning from the bathroom, straightening her clothes as she walked. He watched her, feeling good about the way she moved, the tilt of her head, the sheen of her skin.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Peeping.”

  “You’re a mess.”

  He reached up and put his hands on her lips. She did not respond, but she did not pull away either.

  “What do you think you want?”

  He smiled and she deftly stepped out of his grasp. “That’s what I thought.”

  Blaise sat up and wished he hadn’t. The room swayed and he felt sick. Gin did that sometimes. “Where’s Dobie?”

  “I locked him out back.”

  The dog wouldn’t like that, but Linda had done the sensible thing. “Do you want to go to Escondido instead?”

  “Instead of what?” Linda looked at him and then shook her head. “Where’s Escondido?”

  Blaise lay back on the couch again and closed his eyes, which made him feel a little better. “About forty miles. I’ve got a line on West.”

  “West? We’re looking for Dr. Hill.”

  “Gordon is wherever West decided to put him.”

  She made an impolite sound. “You’re guessing.”

  “Inductive reasoning reads better in a resume.”

  “Can’t you just call?”

  “I did.”

  Linda was settling into the right front seat of the beetle when Dobie came rocketing through the left door. He created some commotion before settling into the backseat.

  “Sorry, Dobie,” Blaise said. “She got there first.”

  Linda gave Blaise an outraged look and was about to demand the dog be left behind when Blaise said, “He showed me the key to Gordon Hill’s house. He could have more to say.” Linda didn’t like it but she seemed to have reached an area of compromise between what she needed and what she wanted.

  Halfway to Escondido, the little beetle shimmying in the wind blast of passing trucks, Linda finally thought of something else to ask.

  “No,” Blaise answered. “He didn’t invite me.” Sagebrush—dotted hills and green reminders of winter rains passed by in silence.

  Escondido rambles, old sections shaded by towering eucalyptus. The new parts are wide concrete streets over once-cheap farmland and flats of sun-drenched housing. Beyond town the turnoff huddled under a clump of oaks. Blaise followed a dirt road past orange trees abandoned by owners into land speculation instead of farming. The road climbed past appple trees gone wild. Shadows had lengthened by the time they crunched gravel under a crosstree with a hanging sign.

  The main building had foot-thick adobe walls and bright whitewash. Peeled saplings held up a ramada green with fresh vines. The door was open but inside the house was shadow.

  “Hello!” Blaise called. “Anybody home?” The sense of city had fled. Knocking at an open door did not seem correct. Dobie was also apparently aware of the difference. Instead of tearing ecstatically through the vineyard he kept a close heel.

  “You should have told them you were coming.” Linda did not exactly wrinkle her nose at rusticity, but she came close.

  Blaise called again. Crickets and tree toads went silent.

  “What is it you want here?” The old man’s voice was thin and creaky with a hint of accent.

  Blaise turned toward the old man’s voice. “Mr. Oesti?”

  Stepping out of the shadow of the ramada, Giovanni Oesti moved like dry sticks cracking.

  “How do you do, sir. I called you earlier.”

  The old man ignored the outstretched hand and turned. “Come. You want to talk. We talk.”

  Blaise and Linda followed him to a windowless building behind the house. The old man stepped inside and light spilled from the open doorway. They followed into a smell of new-sawn wood and the musty fragrance of fermentation. Dobie stood in the doorway with mournful eyes.

  Oesti pointed to unpainted chairs around a potbellied stove. When Linda and Blaise had each taken one, he sat. Looking at the dog in the doorway, he said, “Anchi tu.”

  Dobie’s eyes brightened. Walking carefully like a child trying to act grownup, he settled at Blaise’s feet.

  “Begin.”

  Oesti had toothpick bones and skin like crumpled wrapping paper. His tufts of remaining hair were as shoe-polish black as his unblinking eyes.

  “I was told you could give me some information about a gentleman named Gregory West.”

  “Why do you not ask Mr. West?” The words were thin like torn paper, like the old man himself, and Blaise could read neither warmth nor anger.

  “I don’t believe he would tell me,” Blaise answered. “A friend of mine has disappeared. It’s possible that knowing something about Mr. West would reveal his whereabouts.”

  “Police handle such matters.

  Blaise switched to formal Roman and answered as tactfully as possible. “Signor West probably prefers privacy. I do not know a crime has been committed. In any event, the police never get to the bottom of things. I am bound by honor to help my friend.”

  “L’onnore.” Oesti spoke in dialect. “The curse of our kind!” He gave Blaise a sly look, knowing that some foreigners learn Roman, but no outlander ever understands siciliano.

  “The curse of our kind is not honor,” Blaise said in the same hybrid Latin-Greek. “It’s omerta.”

  “What are you saying?” Linda looked from Blaise to the old man and back, exasperation drawing lines on her face. “I don’t speak dialect, Blaise.”

  “Men are talking,” Blaise said in English.

  “About my son.” Giovanni Oesti spat under the stove.

  “I had guessed.” Linda retreated from the venom in the old man’s voice.

  “Gregorio Giovanni Rampanelli Oesti—after his mother’s father, a man of great understanding.”

  Blaise said nothing.

  “Why did he change his name? Is he shamed by the blood of his fathers?” Oesti challenged Blaise. “He changed his name because I demanded it. Bad enough that he dishonors my father’s name. But he will not shame his mother’s.” The old man folded parchment-thin hands on his nonexistent stomach.

  “I am sorry to have brought this to you,” Blaise said.

  Oesti waved off the apology. “I shall tell you what you have come to hear. And as you say, this is between men. I could not
say such things to a priest for they do not have sons and can only pretend to understand.”

  In the quiet of the winery, Giovanni Oesti’s wavering voice took them back to the days when a boy from Sicily labored in California on land too hilly for crops and speculators.

  He cut and terraced, planted vines, backpacked water drawn from a hand-dug well with a hand pump. It was work that priests once corraled Indians to do. Like the priests, he made wine.

  His son Vito died at Anzio Beach in World War II. After that, the younger boy, Gregorio, was too precious to his mother to dress vines with his father and the Mexicans.

  The wine was sweet and mellow. It made Blaise weep within, and he dreaded the end of the old man’s story. Giovanni Oesti switched to English, in which it is easier to conceal pain.

  Dobie’s mournful eyes flowed from Blaise to the old man, as if he could sense the sadness of the moment.

  “To the Mexicans I was Don Juan. Americans liked my wine. Other places everybody thinks Italians are gangsters. But here, I’m just a neighbor. Some held more land. If I had more money, only my banker cared.

  “Gregorio was not satisfied with a car, a horse, cows, chickens, and miles of vineyards. It would have been better to keep the boy in the fields and teach him the business by leaving his sweat there. It was my fault. Gregorio found new friends in these wonderful schools with their fancy ways.

  “When he came home, the Mexicans made less and worked harder. The wine grew thinner and was sold farther way. With the new money, Gregorio retired his mother and father.

  “Strangers tore up the fields and built houses while Rosanna and I stayed here on the land that was left and saw our lives being stolen.

  “La famìglia,” Giovanni spat. “In school Gregorio met the sons of those who came here not to work but to steal.”

  Dobie gave Blaise a look of entreaty, then began his invisible ninja-maneuvering until his head was in the old man’s lap. Without looking down, Giovanni Oesti patted the Doberman.

  “They . . . took advantage of your son?” It was a delicate question and Blaise could think of no way to phrase the true meaning in Italian or English.

  The old man’s laugh was rustling cornstalks.

  “No, Dottóre, my son used them. This place is not good for the grape. North, above San Francisco, the wine is better. Here you make a life. There you make money.