The God Particle (10 page)

Mike isn’t sure what to make of this. He has a responsibility to act, to help ensure Amy’s work environment is professional and secure, but he owes the same to Larry. And yes, there were complaints like this when they both worked at Fermilab, but Amy probably doesn’t know that. What is it about Larry that aggravates women? Mike needs something concrete if he’s going to censure the guy, because a horrible truth of corporate America is that for some women, sexual harassment only applies to unappealing men.

“Okay,” he finally says. “I’ll talk to Larry for you. I’ll try to make it seem like I’m the one who noticed, rather than you. But you’ll need to help me out, Amy. The first thing Larry’s going to do is point out all the other men who visit your desk, so you’ll need to be more strict with everyone for your argument to hold water.”

She nods.

“What do you think? Is that a fair solution?”

“Sure.”

“Great,” Mike says. “Now let’s eat these sandwiches while they’re still fresh.”

8

Before the accident Steve would have breezed through the interview. The corporate officers know him well, after all, familiar as they are with his work ethic and proven success in the struggling field of e-business. Before the accident, the interview would have been nothing more than a formality, but now they’ll be there to truly evaluate him, searching like jewelers for blemishes and cracks invisible to the casual observer.

Steve spends some time clearing obsolete e-mails out of his in-box. He ignores mental film clips of Janine, the love of his life, squeaking and begging the faceless Barry to defile her. He pushes away the memory of Anna lifting her red dress. Or the stocky fellow who threw him out the window. Or Anna coming to him in the hospital room, an apparition, perhaps already dead—

He’s been intentionally avoiding this. He doesn’t want to consider the consequences of Anna’s mysterious fall. It’s not like he could have forgotten what the newsstand proprietor said, that she fell to her death in the exact fashion by which Steve himself nearly died, but how could that have happened? And why? He can’t help but wonder if her death is somehow connected to his struggle with the bouncer. That perhaps the man killed her because she witnessed Steve’s fall from the window. He doesn’t want to believe that, doesn’t want to believe her death was in any way connected to him, but how else to explain such a coincidence? And if the bouncer had in fact killed her, why wait so long? Steve knows Anna lived at least a few more days after his own fall, because according to the nurse, that’s when she brought the ring to him.

He performs a quick search on the Internet to locate contact information for the Zurich police and then dials the number.

“Zurich Police,” a female voice barks in German.

“Hello, I would like to inquire about the recent death of a woman in Zurich.”

“Wait, please,” the woman says. Unfamiliar pop music replaces her voice, and then a few seconds later a man picks up the line.

“Baltensperger speaking. How may I help you?”

“I would like to inquire about the death of a woman. It would have happened sometime in the last thirty days.”

“What is the name of this woman? What information would you like and why?”

“I only know her first name,” Steve says. “It was Anna, I believe. I understand she fell to her death from a building in the Niederdorf. Near the business known as Cabaret.”

A long, static-filled silence passes as Steve waits. He knows it’s only a matter of time before the man berates him for not knowing the woman’s full name, for inquiring about someone for which he can offer so little information.

“What is your name, sir?”

Steve, in a reflexive moment of self-preservation, lies to Baltensperger. “Alan Johnson.”

“What is your relationship to this woman?”

“I met her in Cabaret a few weeks ago. Later I went back to see her, but the business had closed and I was told she fell to her death.”

“I think I would like to speak to you in person about this, Mr. Johnson. Can you come to the station? Now?”

“Now? No.”

“May I ask why?”

“Because I am in the United States.”

Another considerable pause. And then, “Very well, Mr. Johnson. Perhaps we can do this over the telephone. First, the woman’s name is not Anna. It is Svetlana Kiselev. She took the name Anna when she began work at the Cabaret a little more than six months ago.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Can you tell me the last time you saw Svetlana? What day it was?”

Steve thinks back, indexing the days before and since his fall. “August nineteenth.”

“Mr. Johnson,” Baltensperger says. “Svetlana was found dead the morning of the twentieth.”

From someplace so close he can touch and yet infinitely distant, the field emerges and intensifies as Steve tries to absorb what Baltensperger has just said. His fingers absently find his temples and massage them. This woman, Svetlana, brought the ring to the hospital. He knows this because the nurse told him so, because she pulled it out of his overcoat and showed it to him.

“Mr. Johnson? Does this seem like an odd coincidence to you? Because it looks that way to me.”

“Are you sure about the date?” Steve asks. “It was very late when I saw Svetlana. Perhaps as late as four in the morning.”

“Which means you may be the last person to have seen her alive. I really must insist, Mr. Johnson, that I obtain an official statement from you, preferably in person.”

The presence is all around him now. Silently thrumming. “Do you have any suspects?” Steve asks.

“Of course I cannot officially comment on that,” Baltensperger says. “But we could certainly learn more from the owner of Cabaret had he not disappeared. And there is word of an American who died that night, I have his name here somewhere, just a moment while I—”

Unable to listen to Baltensperger any longer, not through the drowning silence of the field, Steve hangs up the phone. At the very least, the call will be traced to AE’s switchboard, and the police can eventually obtain internal records if they choose. Not that he has anything to hide. It was probably stupid to lie to Baltensperger about his identity, but that doesn’t change the fact that something is obviously, desperately wrong with the timing of Svetlana’s death. This is something he cannot deal with right now. This is his office. This is a place of lucidity. His interview is tomorrow. There is no room in his reclaimed life for a Swiss murder investigation.

And yet there is the issue of the nurse. Steve himself had not asked about Svetlana or the ring. He asked about the IV, and the nurse replied, after a pause, how the Russian woman delivered the ring “a couple of days after you were brought here.” When certainly she did not. Svetlana could not have brought the ring any time except immediately upon his arrival at the hospital, because she was found dead that morning. But is it plausible to believe that, after his fall, Svetlana had plundered his clothes for valuables, found the ring, let the ambulance take him away, decided against keeping it, taken the train to the hospital, given the ring to a staff member there, commuted back to Cabaret, and then was immediately thrown from the building to her death? Or is it more likely that the ring never left his jacket? That when the ambulance came for him at Cabaret, Svetlana turned over the clothes he’d left in room CD and had never known about the ring in the first place? Or was even dead by then?

If so, it means the nurse fabricated her story. He can think of no other explanation.

But why?

As much as he doesn’t want to have to know, Steve is obligated by his place in the middle of this mess to find out. The most straightforward way to accomplish this would be to call the hospital in Zurich, track down the nurse, and ask her. But it occurs to him (for the first time) that he doesn’t even know the name of the hospital. In his wallet he finds the business card Dobbelfeld provided, but the hospital information isn’t printed on it. And rather than contact the doctor and raise his suspicion (because, come on, if there is some sort of conspiracy, then everyone must be involved, especially his physician), Steve instead places a call to AE’s benefits contact, Diana Jackson, and asks her to review the hospital’s insurance claim.

“Oh, Mr. Keeley,” she says. “I heard you were back. We were all so worried for you.”

“Thank you. It’s great to be here.”

“Did you get a bill from the hospital? Is that why you’re calling?”

“To be honest, I’m calling because I don’t know the name of the hospital, and I want to give them a call.”

“Oh, well that should be easy to find. Let me just . . . well, hold on. Can I ask you to hold for a minute, Mr. Keeley?”

“Sure, Diana. Take your time.”

AE’s hold music propaganda keeps him company while he waits, as conspiratorial possibilities disturb the field around him. Would the nurse intentionally lie about the ring in order to warn him about something? How could she be sure he would ever learn of Svetlana’s death, anyway? Would the bouncer really kill Svetlana? And why had the owner of the Cabaret closed the business and fled?

“Mr. Keeley?”

“Yes?”

“I’m not sure why, but there’s no insurance claim for your hospital stay in Zurich, for the medical procedures, for
anything.
Normally such claims are put in immediately, and certainly after a month something should have shown up.”

“Could there be some mix-up or delay because it was a foreign hospital?”

“Well, I considered that, so I checked the major Zurich hospitals that come up in my system. With this new SAP software everything is tied together, all the different AE offices share the same information, so I can check it just like I was in Switzerland. Can you believe none of them have a record of you staying there? Isn’t that odd?”

“Are you sure our system is complete? Maybe there is a hospital that isn’t listed in the computer.”

“I’ll certainly call headquarters in Zurich and find out. I’m sure they’ve all gone home for the day, what with the nine-hour time difference. But first thing in the morning I’ll call over to HR there and check with those people. Then we’ll know for sure.”

“That’s very nice of you, Diana. I appreciate it. You’ll let me know in the morning, then?”

“I’ll call you as soon as I find out, Mr. Keeley.”

He hangs up and realizes he should summarize it all and form a plan, determine his next steps. He shouldn’t sit there and remember Svetlana in her red dress. He shouldn’t listen to the noise, or watch the noise, or feel the noise.

The scrambled images.

He must obviously direct his full attention to the field now, to the relationships between it and the physical items in this room. Its individual points are organized somehow into patterns, waves, something, he can feel how their relationships could be altered and perhaps even cancelled altogether, and this, Steve can clearly see, is how he planned to levitate off the bed. Of course it is. He knew if he waited that eventually it would come back to him, the proper perspective. Only now, with this additional information, these patterns of discrete points—though they aren’t really necessarily discrete—with this better information he also realizes why his levitation at the hospital was a failure, because seeing the mechanism and being able to manipulate it are completely independent, and he’ll have to devote a lot of time and energy and attention to the field, will have to study it closely if he plans to—

“Steve?”

For some reason he can’t see. His face is pressed flat against something and his eyes are closed. He opens them and finds his head on the desk. As if he were napping. A pool of saliva sits like mercury just inches from his mouth.

Serena stands before him. Somehow he failed to notice until now that she isn’t wearing pantyhose. None of the younger women do, it isn’t in fashion right now, but considering the little black miniskirt she has on, there isn’t much of anything to cover the aroma drifting from between her legs. An aroma that he is, at this very moment in warped spacetime, enjoying immensely.

“Steve, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he says, sitting straight up in his chair, presenting himself (he’s quite sure) as completely normal.

“You don’t look so good,” Serena says.

“I was just taking a little nap. I haven’t been sleeping . . . well.”

“You look a little spaced out.”

The noise is more intense than ever. And the voices, hesitant, insecure, whispering.

A name again. Two words.

Before he can stop himself, Steve says, “Tell me what you know about Simon Slater.”

“What?”

He can hardly control his own voice. “Isn’t that what you came in here to talk about? Simon Slater?”

“No. Have you been reading my e-mail?”

“Of course not,” Steve bristles, even though he cannot confirm or deny images of an e-mail to someone named Klaus. “What makes you say that?”

“You know goddamned well what makes me say that.”

Klaus. Karsten. Something.

“Serena, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Let me spell it out for you, then. I thought Simon Slater took your VP job. I heard he was in Switzerland for executive training. So after you and I talked this morning, I sent an e-mail to a friend of mine in Zurich, and it turns out Simon is there for
another
job, something completely unrelated. Which means I was wrong, I made up something in my mind that wasn’t true at
all,
and yet you’re asking me about it. And the only way you could have known to ask about him was to read my e-mail.”

Steve knows he just made a severe tactical error. But how is he supposed to think clearly through all this noise? And now, somehow, he must dig himself out of a fairly deep hole while Serena stands above him, looking down.

“Company e-mail isn’t private,” he points out, appropriating her accusation for his own purposes, because what other explanation can he offer for blurting out Simon Slater’s name? “Your employment agreement clearly states—”

“I know what it says. But I wonder what reason you’ll have to give Jim Mannheim when he demands probable cause.”

“I don’t need probable cause.”