Hungry Ghosts (28 page)

Broder simply turned away, as if from a small yappy dog. It was clear I was banished.

I had blown it. Furious with them, with myself, I strode off down the street to Columbus and raced through traffic into Chinatown. I hurried along Grant Avenue, past darkened windows of butchers where freshly killed chickens hung in the windows, and tchotchke shops with gaudy laughing Buddhas, flower-bedecked flip-flops, and T-shirts from last year's rock concerts. I cut around families, past elderly women dressed in drab clothes schlepping stuffed woven bags, past straw-thin young women in saucy fashions.

I needed to think. I needed to talk to Leo, but he was the one person I couldn't possibly reach. I could call Yamana-roshi, my old teacher in New York . . . No, wait, it was the middle of the night in New York. It was verging on the middle of the night here. I needed to . . . get calm and think. The Buddha said: put no head above your own. I had to trust my own head. If Yamana-roshi, or Leo, or the Buddha were sitting across from me in dokusan, what would he say?

Sit down.

I almost stumbled down the steps of a tiny restaurant six steps below street level. Even at this hour two tables were occupied, one by a couple of plump and serious Chinese men, and the other by a younger couple. At a third table I sat down and ordered noodles and a pot of tea.

My interviews with Leo had been casual and his teachings had often taken me by surprise. But Yamana-roshi, who'd been a priest in Japan, retained the formality of the dokusan interview, and it was his form that filled the chair opposite me here.

Leo is already in jail. As soon as Korematsu realizes Jeffrey was stabbed with Leo's zendo knife, he's going to be hard-pressed to look any further than Leo.

This is the reality you create in your thoughts, Darcy.

I felt the same jolt of annoyance I had every time Yamana-roshi had said that. Now I was annoying myself!

The illusion of Yamana looked at me and insisted:
What is real?

The tea arrived, not in the standard white pot but in a small black iron pot, a miniature of the one at our reception. It was odd to find a tetsubin in a Chinese restaurant, but then it was odd to be a Caucasian doubling a Japanese actress playing the part of a Chinese prostitute.
What is real?
I sipped the tea.

Exactly.

I smiled and felt the hot liquid flowing down my body.

What is real?

Rats. I knew the tack Yamana used. How could I know what was real when I could only see through my own eyes?

Exactly.

I didn't bother to smile, I waited.

What do you
not
see? What is it you are avoiding seeing?

That was an unusual detour into the psychological for Yamana.

Not psychology. Fact: the police are on a detour to Leo Garson. What will bring them back to the true road? What are you avoiding?

The noodles came. I slurped noodles, drank the hot, salty, spicy broth, and ignored the ghost of Yamana.

What is real?

Dammit, the only thing that was real was the drug Tia took from Jeffrey.

Exactly.

I didn't need a ghost to tell me what I was avoiding, what was down a tunnel where a man had died, down a narrow hole into the dark and who knew what?

But the police would have the scene cordoned off for hours. There was nothing I could do. What I needed now was some sleep. And someplace safe to do it. I needed someone I could trust.

Suddenly, in a way that was not a thought but was real, I knew who that person was. I called my sister Grace.

Then, punching the phone off, I lifted my teacup to Yamana. I wished he were here and I could pour him a cup.

No need. I'm not a hungry ghost. He laughed and laughed.

C
HAPTER
27

FRIDAY

G
RACIE
'
S ELDERLY
station wagon, in which she'd hauled families of patients, groups of medical students, towers of boxes, and probably substances I didn't want to know about, clanked up, and I climbed in. The time was nearly 2
A.M
.

“I'm surprised you remembered the Lott Spot, Darcy.”

“Considering the amount of time I spent shivering on this corner waiting for the unlucky sib Mom corralled, it's no surprise. You, at least, came. More than once, Gary forgot me.”

“You're hiding out? Some things never change.” She drove up Washington, turned left on Drumm, and made a loose right two blocks later, heading for the familiar night route up Sacramento, through Chinatown, over Nob Hill and Russian Hill, to Pacific Heights, taking advantage of the late hour and the one-way street. “I suppose you think I'll protect you, huh, Darce?”

“That's my plan.”

“You and Mike, you got such a free ride. John used to grumble that if it weren't for him, you'd have had no discipline at all.”

“Yeah, well, he sure filled that void. When I left, he must have had hours of free time every day.”

Grace laughed that small sly laugh that said she understood and was
with you but, still, she had to watch her back. “Mike was bad, but you were awful. The monkey.” She pulled into the intersection at Polk Street as the light turned red and rattled slowly across. Grace was notorious for her absent-minded driving. For her, time in the car was rare time alone to ponder and mull without interruption. Watching the road, much less her own speed, was an interruption. With Grace driving, you could observe death moseying toward you as she elaborated on the specifics of the municipal emergency plan she was working on.

I turned to face her. “Gracie, I had lunch with Tia the day she died. Do you know what the last thing she said to me was?”

“No.”

“She asked me for your phone number.”

“She didn't call me.”

“Right after that, she walked outside, got in Jeffrey's car. He drove her back to the zendo and she was killed.”

“Your point?” Grace snapped.

I had forgotten this defensive side of hers. “My point is that she wanted something from you. That was the reason she invited me to lunch, to reconnect with you. She said, Gracie, that she didn't want to talk to you about her health—something else. Her voice—you know how it is when a person tries to sound like they're just dropping in a casual question, but it's the whole point?—well, that's how this was.”

“I—”

“No, let me work this through. She'd already stashed a drug she'd been desperate to get; she'd lifted it from Jeffrey Hagstrom at the reception the night before and hidden it away—”

“Why'd this guy bring a drug to the reception?”

“I can't say for sure. Maybe he was going to dole some out to Tia later and she got tired of being doled to. It's not like he could leave it in the
apartment he rented in the Tenderloin. But the thing is, Tia still needed something else, something from you,
you
specifically. She didn't want, she
needed
. She was tense the night before for obvious reasons. But she was still tense at lunch and it all came to a head, in a tightly controlled way, in her question about how to reach you. Gracie, why you?”

“I was with her after the accident. She was grateful.” Grace put out, as an opener.

“But why suddenly now? She made the decision to call you the night before, after the reception. She invited me to lunch then.”

“Why didn't she just ask for my phone number then?”

“She started to! She said, ‘Do you have her phone—' But then she shifted to invite me to lunch and so I didn't pay any mind to that. The thing is, we weren't alone. She must not have wanted anyone to know she needed you.” I looked across the dark at her small sharp-boned profile, her hands at ten and two o'clock on the wheel. “What did she want from you that she wouldn't want anyone to know about?”

“I can't imagine.”

“Gracie, she was stabbed to death the next day! This is the last thing she asked for. It's important! Think! What do you have, what do you know?”

“Well, I'm a doctor.”

“No, you're a particular kind of doctor, an epidemiologist.”

“And?”

“Where does
your
medical knowledge—whatever it is, maybe not your specialty—intersect with Tia, past or present? That's what you have to be thinking about.”

“Sorry. Okay, give me a second. Well, when I first met Tia, in emergency, her pelvis was such a mess I didn't think it would be possible to put it back together. I didn't think she'd walk. But she did. She had more focus, more ability to make herself endure pain than anyone I've seen.
The thing is, Darcy, pain wears you down; it programs the neural pathways. You can't endure it forever. It's not mental weakness that makes people take more and more painkillers; it's that the pain debilitates the body. It narrows your world.”

“Do you think she'd ever have asked you for illegal painkillers? Maybe to tide her over till she could use what she'd just gotten?”

“No!” Grace snapped.

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because, Darcy, we'd already had that conversation. She was willing to take her chances with the law, but I can't do that.”

“When was this?”

“A couple of years ago. Before my divorce. Before I moved back in with Mom.”

I nodded. That would explain Tia's not knowing Grace's phone number now. “Maybe she thought you had something new, something experimental? Something to do with suppressing epidemics.”

Grace laughed. “Like what? The silver bullet for epidemics? There is
nothing
on the horizon; that's why we're still talking quarantine. The only biological agents I know about are the pathogens themselves.”

“Well, is there such a thing as an organism with a split personality, a Jekyll and Hyde pathogen? Could one also have a palliative potential?”

“No.”

“Are you absolutely sure?”

“Well, of course, there are always people who want to believe that apricot pits cure cancer and poison darts are the way to heaven. But—”

“Poison darts? Why did you mention that?”

“Just an example—”

“No, Gracie, it's not just any example, it's the one that came to your mind. Something brought it to mind. What?”

“I don't know—”

“What do you know about poison darts?” It was the wrong question to ask when she had to make a left and cut across four lanes. Behind us brakes squealed; a horn honked. Gracie waved as if to acknowledge . . . something.

“Poison darts. They were used by the natives in Central and South America and parts of Africa. Some poisons are made from bark, like ouabain in Somalia or curare, others from poison dart frog secretions. The military was hot after golden poison dart frog for a while.”

“Golden poison dart frog? Is it green and gold?”

But my sister was in full exposition mode, not about to be diverted. “The frog is so poisonous that just touching its tongue to something the frog has walked over is enough to kill a small dog. The poison is absorbed through mucous membranes. One frog carries enough to kill ten people. The army researchers figured they could reduce it to the essentials, tweak the format, and come up with weapons-grade extract. Then they'd add an accelerant and bingo, thousands dead.”

My breath caught. I could barely get out the words: “How does it kill?”

She hesitated. “It's a neurotoxin.”

“Specifically?”

“The nerves stop transmitting impulses. The muscles are contracted, but they're inactive.”

“So patients just go stiff? They're alert but stiff?”

“Well, yeah. But there's no research on that; it's not like the dogs report in after they die.” She drifted into the slow lane on Geary Boulevard and turned to assess me. “Why are you so interested in this?”

“Remember John grumbling about that case in the Tenderloin, the guy who fell over the railing and John thought the neighbors had let him lie on the ground floor till rigor took hold?”

“Yeah?”

“Turns out the guy went stiff before he fell. That's got to be why he fell.”

Her hands tightened on the wheel. The car had slowed to ten miles per hour. “You think he dosed himself, somehow, with golden frog dart poison? It's incredibly dangerous stuff. Word is, the military researchers gave up on it because of its toxicity.”

“How so?”

She turned toward me. “Three researchers died. Two trapping the frogs and one guy who'd gotten some in his eye. All this is rumor; the whole thing was high-level hush-hush. But why do you care?”

I jabbed my finger toward the road. When she was facing forward again, I said, “Suppose you used it, sufficiently diluted, on your skin, on your torso, not near a mucous membrane? Would it numb your pain?”