The Glass Factory (23 page)

“Hey, I’m the one who designed this map, remember?” She copies the screen and opens a new file, pastes the image in, then she speeds the mouse around the screen, knocking off buildings like a squadron of bombers armed with laser-guided weapons over a hostile target. Highlight. Click. Erase. Highlight. Click. Erase. Until there’s only one building left. Then she doubles the size again, and again until the outline fills the screen. She expands and draws in everything she can remember about the layout.

“I was only in the place once for the ribbon-cutting ceremony,” she says. But I put my faith in her designer’s eyes. She draws in the walls, the doors, even some of the partitions and wiring details. After a few minutes she prints it out on laser paper.

For God’s sakes. A fucking typeset map. “Kate, I think I love you.”

“Try not to let it show.”

I smile. “Any idea what Morse is doing in there? Electrical conductivity? Microprocessing? What?”

“Don’t know.”

“What if it’s chemical? I don’t know how to handle chemicals.”

“We do have an excellent chemistry department.”

“Lots of grad students?”

“Lots of professors, too.”

“I’ll stick to the students. Where’s the Chem Building?”

“Jesus, what do you want me to do? Draw you a map?”

I go to the bathroom to piss out those three cups of coffee, then I have to stand there wasting more of my precious lifetime because all they have in there are those ridiculous hot-air blowers that claim they “Dry hands more thoroughly and
keep washroom free of towel waste.”
Oh yeah, that’s always been a big problem in my life.

The first chemistry grad student I talk to is nice but incompetent. The second one is too absorbed in his work to be of any use to anybody. The third is downright asocial. The fourth eyes me with suspicion. The fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth are not interested. The ninth is hostile. The tenth is not interested. The eleventh is hostile
and
not interested. The twelfth—

The twelfth is a Chinese American woman wearing a white labcoat with a button on it that says,
KISS
ME,
I’M
POLISH.
A sense of humor is a definite sign of humanity. She is bent over the valve on a four-foot vertical graduated pipette, trying to regulate the flow of a dark blue liquid into a 500 ml beaker of something clear. The lab makes me feel like I’ve been shrunk and stuffed inside a Wurlitzer organ: A network of foot-wide pipes runs up the wall and snakes alongside the air ducts on the ceiling to God knows where. Some of the pipes are clear glass. I remember one time Gina told me that means they contain liquids that would eat through normal metal pipes, which is not a pleasant thought.

“Got a moment?” I ask. Okay, so it’s not brilliant. The caffeine’s wearing off.

“Not really. I’ve got to verify the structural formulas for the four positionally isomeric carboxylic acids that have the molecular formula C
₅
H
₁₀
O
₂
and identify any carbon atom that is a source of stereoisomerism, then I’ve got to identify the monosaccharides produced by acid hydrolysis of this compound.” She slides a sheet of paper along the lab table towards me. The structure looks like this:

“Any ideas?” she asks me.

“Hell no.”

“Actually, this is basic freshman chem stuff. I’ve just got to set up an answer key and correct two hundred and thirty exams of it by Friday
and
set up Professor Ling’s NMR session by lunchtime.” She moves swiftly and confidently among the flasks, glassware and hypersensitive digital balances, doing whatever the heck it is she’s doing. “Fooled you, huh?”

“Sure did.”

“No, this is strictly for beginners.”

“You really know this stuff, don’t you?”

“Either that or I’m fooling some real experts.”

I like her. She’s got irreverence, wit and nerve—i.e., just what I need. I introduce myself. We talk. Her name is Wai-Wai Choi. She also uses the Americanized “Vicky.” I tell her I like Wai-Wai. Wai-Wai’s dad was Chinese and her mom’s American. She’s
gorgeous.
She, too, looks about nineteen. Everyone looks nineteen. One thing about dealing with a university is everyone seems so goddamned young.

“By the way,” she asks, “What the hell do you want?”

I look at her. Does she mean it? She’s not even looking at me, drying and stacking test tubes at a pace that would have left Speedy Gonzales panting for breath. I figure that’s just the way she talks.

So I go for the blunt approach. “I need some chemical advice.”

“Go on.”

“I used to be a cop.”

“Really? I’ve always wanted to know, is it really possible to shoot at a moving car, pop the tires, and make it explode in a white-hot ball of flame?”

I tell her your average car tire takes about two minutes to deflate after being pierced by a standard police .38 bullet.

“Not like on TV, huh?” she says.

I shake my head.

“Figures,” she says. “Oh, I don’t know how much longer I can take this relationship. I continue to worship my TV, but it just keeps lying to me, making up these ridiculous stories, spending all night in other people’s living rooms, oh, I don’t know why I put up with it. Some day I’m just going to throw it out into the street.”

There’s a moment of silence, then we both burst out laughing. I like this woman. I ask: “Will you help me?”

“Help you what?”

I’m about to speak, when the wall phone rings. She tells me to hold on a second and she goes and answers it. She switches into Chinese and I’m astounded. I guess I shouldn’t be, being a cross-cultural hybrid myself. But she just seems so Americanized. Born here and everything. She’s writing down a long message in Chinese. I glance at it. It looks like a piece of found art to me, infinitely more foreign than that chemistry stuff, and a humbling symbol of the limits of my abilities, of all that I will never know.

She tells me there’s nothing I can’t learn if I don’t want to. So I tell her I want to learn what Samuel Morse is doing on the South Campus incubator site.

“Oh,
those
assholes,” she says.

“You know them?”

“Sure. They come in here all the time, pulling talent for their little problems.”

“You collaborate with them?”

“Yeah, the department’s got a deal. We give them chemicals and brain cells, and they let us keep our kneecaps.”

“Seriously, what do you mean?”

“I mean they always take over like they own the place. Damn obnoxious bunch, too. Gets on my nerves.”

“What’s so obnoxious about them?”

“They always want us to drop whatever we’re doing and wait on them whenever it suits them, okay? I call that obnoxious. It’s usually just piecework, which wouldn’t be so bad, but they never tell us how the pieces fit together, and they don’t want us to discuss the details of what they’re doing with anybody—which is inappropriate at an institute of higher learning, if you ask me, and it’s also pretty damn hard to do with a department full of chemists.”

“Seems like Mr. Morse is working real hard to keep a secret.”

“Sure is. Why? What do you want to do?”

“Find out what his secret is.”

“No shit? How?”

“Tell me, if I brought back a sample of what he was working on, do you think you could analyze it?”

“You mean like Sherlock Holmes and his study on distinguishing thirty different kinds of tobacco from the ash?”

“It was a monograph on the ashes of one hundred and forty different varieties of pipe, cigar, and cigarette tobacco.”

Wai-Wai whistles. “He was some kick-ass chemist.”

“So what do you think?”

“With absolutely nothing to go on, it could take weeks to get what you want. You’d have to lift some of his software, too.”

“Who said anything about stealing?”

Wai-Wai eyes me like she’s saying, Oh,
nobody.
So I tell her: “Okay, here’s the deal. I’ve tried to find some information at the Morse Techtonics plant, but even the toilet paper is classified. But I figure the security at a State University site can’t be what it is at Morse’s corporate headquarters. And if I’m caught, it’s only going to be by campus security. Them I can deal with—”

“But chemicals, analytic software—”

“Yeah. That’s out of my league.” I sigh. Blocked again.

’Til Wai-Wai says: “Sounds like I’ll have to go with you.”

CHAPTER TEN

Science without conscience is but the ruin of the soul.
—Rabelais

I SHOOT OVER
to Old Town beach. On the way a local cop for the village of Old Town stops me and asks me for ID. I ask, “Is biking considered suspicious activity in this neighborhood?”

His face hardens, but then I pop my wallet open to the badge. He smiles. “Off duty?”

“You got it.” For the last several years.

Now we’re brothers in blue, so it’s okay with him if I want to bike to the beach, but I am left wondering what constitutes probable cause around here. (Driving without a cell phone?) I hang at the beach for a while looking at the couples, the parents with kids and the teenagers playing volleyball and whatever that ankle-ball game is called.

I lock the bike, take a long drink of water from the squeeze bottle and look around. I spotted one group when I biked in here, but I’ve been giving them some time to get used to my presence.

I casually unhook my helmet and amble over to a bunch of kids. They look about sixteen, seventeen. Not out of high school yet. Most have long, kinky hair, mass-produced Day-Glo tie-dyed T-shirts, skateboards, the works. And I can tell by the air that somebody’s just pocketed a joint. I figure that’ll work in my favor, if they don’t get paranoid on me.

I go up to the guy whose car they’re leaning on and extend my hand. “Hi. My name’s Filomena. What’s yours?”

“What’s up?” he says. Not moving. My hand’s out and he’s not moving.

“What’s up?” he repeats.

I drop my hand. “You kids from around here?”

No answer. Damn. This is not working.

And I realize I’m an old lady to these kids. Couldn’t possibly be cool. They close in around me, protecting their friend. Glad they ain’t bikers.

I tell them, “Look, I’m not trying to bust you.” You idiots. “I’m just trying to find out if you know anyone who’s ever gone up the beach and partied up at the old Shore Oaks estate.”

…
ting!
Was that the sound of a pin dropping in Poughkeepsie? Or just another thread snapping in the enigma I’m trying most unsuccessfully to unravel?

I have to give up. I wander along the beach trying a few more possibilities, but it all turns up the same—empty.

I unlock the bike and gear up. I’ve got a long way to bike and plenty of time to think about cops—especially county cops pushing their way in past my door and me faking them out once or twice but knowing that, if I don’t come up with something better, eventually they would have all the power they wanted to use on me and I’d have none.

My only hope is that Suffolk County’s too far out of it to have anybody who’s that good, but after these past few days, I don’t know. For all I know those kids work for Morse and they’ve got a videophone hookup under one of their skateboards and they’re phoning in a report right now with a description of what I’m wearing and which way I’m headed, south along Running River Road towards Route 347.

That’s how out there I’m getting. Gina was right. I’ve got to switch to decaf.