The Magic Bullet (47 page)

But to his surprise, Perez just turned from the bench where he was working and nodded soberly toward the far end of the room.

Logan was stunned. There, atop a stool, sat Allen Atlas.

“Hello, Dan,” said Atlas. He indicated the woeful surroundings. “Nice place.”

“What do you want?”

“Nothing much. Just to talk.”

“Sorry,” he said coldly, “I’ve got work to do.”

“I appreciate that. Actually, that’s what I want to talk to you about—work.”

Though the guy fairly oozed sincerity, Logan couldn’t help but feel he was being mocked. “I’ve got nothing to talk to you about,
nothing
. Let’s not try to pretend that what’s happened didn’t happen.”

Atlas nodded toward Perez. “Maybe we could have this conversation someplace else?”

“Don’t worry, he already knows all about you.”

“Just ten minutes, that’s all it’ll take. I promise, you won’t be sorry.”

To himself at least, Logan didn’t deny he was intrigued. What was the son of a bitch after? He glanced at his watch. “Ten minutes.”

“All right,” Logan said, as they entered the bar two doors down from HIV-EX, “you’re down to six.”

Atlas smiled. “You should’ve warned me you’ve got the slowest elevator in New York.”

“Your problem.” They sat down in an empty booth. “Now, what do you want?”

“Wait a sec, will you. Won’t you at least let me order us something to drink?”

He returned a minute later with two beers and placed one on the table before Logan. “Drink up, it’s on the ACF.”

“No, thanks.”

“C’mon, Logan, this is no easier for me than it is for you. Let’s just make nice for a few minutes and see what we can do for one another.”

“Screw you, Atlas. I didn’t come looking for you.” Logan took a quick swig of beer and glanced at his watch. “Two minutes.”

Atlas held up both hands, a gesture of surrender. “You’re right, you didn’t.” He paused. “I’m just trying to say that there’ve been some real second thoughts at the ACF about what happened to you guys. Dr. Stillman, for one, recognizes it could’ve been handled a lot better.”

Logan leaned forward, his eyes narrow. “Which part are you talking about, Allen? How they fucked us at the hearing, or how they fucked me when I went looking for another job?”

“That’s your imagination, Logan, we had nothing to do with that.”

“Sorry. Time’s up.”

“Wait!” Atlas grabbed his arm. “Look, Stillman’s ready to bury the hatchet. You want a better job, the ACF can help you out.”

“Why, Atlas? All of a sudden they’re growing consciences down there instead of tumors?”

“We’re doing what we’ve always done, trying to cure cancer. Dr. Stillman wants you to know he’s had a chance to go over your data a lot more carefully. He thinks your Compound J has some promise. He’d like to talk it over with you.”

“Tell me something I don’t know, Atlas. Tell him I’m always more touched when he asks personally.” He shook his arm free. “And tell him I’m happy where I am.”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” snapped Atlas, all pretense of cordiality gone. “You’re gonna lose any talent you’ve got in a dump like that! And any shot at a reputation.”

Logan stood up and came close to saying it:
Hey, asshole, don’t worry about my talent. It’s YOU trying to rip ME off
. But instead he just walked out the door.

Atlas hurried after him outside. “Hey, Logan!”

Logan wheeled to face him. “That’s final, Atlas. No negotiation.” This was starting to give him the kind of pleasure he thought he’d never again experience in science. “But do tell him how much I love being kissed up to.”

“I will.” Disconcertingly, he was smiling again. “Just one more thing—I’m real sorry about your friend Reston?”

“What about him?”

“Didn’t you hear?” He paused meaningfully. “They found his body in his office the other day. Barbiturates. Apparently he got tired of living.”

Logan just watched as Atlas turned and walked off in the other direction.

* * *

Amy answered the phone on the first ring. As soon as he heard her voice—flat, detatched—he realized she was in bad shape.

“Amy? It’s Dan Logan.”

“Hi. How are you?”

“I’m okay. How are
you?
” He paused. “I heard about what happened.”

“I’m doing okay, better. It’s been almost a week. I’m going back to work tomorrow.”

“I’m so, so sorry. You know, even after everything that happened he was still—”

“Yeah, I know.”

“—my friend. I don’t think it was ever personal.”

“Well, thanks,” she said. “Look, Dan, it was nice of you to call.”

Logan was caught short. He didn’t want to get off, not yet. There were too many questions demanding answers. Desperately, he plunged ahead, seeking the vital young woman he knew. “Allen Atlas told me.”

“Atlas?”

“He was in New York today, on business. I could hardly believe it. It just seems so completely out of character. Do you have any explanation for it? Did he leave a note?”

“Please, Dan, I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I don’t mean to get so personal, but it’s important.”

“Really, I just don’t.”

“Why not?”

“Good-bye, Dan. Thank you for calling.”

Hanging up the phone, Logan turned to Perez, sweeping up the far corner of the lab. “She wouldn’t tell me a thing.”

“It’s not easy being the girlfriend. She probably feels guilty about not picking up the signals.”

“You think so?”

“I’ve seen it lots of times. It’s sad, ‘cause it’s not really their fault.”

Logan thought it over a moment. “This isn’t one of
those cases. Something’s off.” He paused. “She doesn’t think he killed himself.”

Perez stopped his sweeping. “What are you telling me? Did she say that?”

“No. But I know her. I also knew him.” He stopped. “There’s also the way Atlas told me about it.”

“The
way
he told you about it?”

“Almost like, I don’t know … a threat.”

“Oh, come on, your damn imagination’s working overtime again. Just stop it, man, you’re really starting to worry me big time.”

This gave Logan pause. Perez’s judgment was rock solid. “You think so?”

“Look, the guy did himself in. Period. You know better than anyone how that place crushes people. That other one, the one you found …”

“Barbara Lukas?”

“Was that a fake too? What do they do down there, murder people for being pains-in-the-ass?”

Logan smiled. “I’m going home. This is one time you might actually be right.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” he said, shrugging it away. “C’mon, you’ve had a rough day, I’ll buy you dinner.”

“Another time. What I need now’s some peace and quiet.” He laughed. “Or maybe you think that’s just my imagination too?”

But twenty minutes later, when he arrived at his studio apartment, kidding around was the farthest thing from his mind. Heading home, he’d been seized by so powerful a sense of anxiety that, once inside, he ran to the medicine cabinet for a mild sedative. He was perspiring heavily. He took his pulse: 120. What was going on here? Distractedly, aware he was hungry, he opened a can of baked beans. He was just slitting open a package of hot dogs when he was hit with a sharp pain in the right lower quadrant.

Within a minute the shooting pains were coming regularly,
every fifteen or twenty seconds, powerful enough to make him double over in pain. He staggered to the next room and collapsed on the bed.

Now there came a terrific pounding in his head, so intense, it all but crowded out thought. Yet he was so weak he could scarcely even move. Struggling to maintain control, seeking clarity, he managed to bring his hands to his temple and squeeze.

Could this be a flu? But, no, it had just come on too fast, and the symptoms were incongruent.

Appendicitis? Invariably that starts in the midepigastrium, not working its way down to the right lower quadrant for a good twenty-four hours. And this wasn’t tenderness—it was pain.

Food poisoning? What had he eaten today? His mind raced. For breakfast, only a bowl of Rice Krispies and orange juice. For lunch—what?—some chicken noodle soup, a bagel with jelly, tea. He’d just taken the sedative—could that have something to do with it?

Wait a second … the beer with Atlas!

The panic suddenly welling up within was even greater than the pain. Could that have set off the anxiety? Was it possible the further reaction was then triggered by the sedative? Or was that just mad speculation? His head swam, he felt himself losing consciousness. He had to get to a hospital, had to get this shit out of his system! Pushing down on the bed with all his strength, he raised himself to his hands and knees.

But it was too much. He actually saw the blackness coming and felt it begin to wash over him.

When he awoke, the room was still dark. The clock on the bedside table read 3:23
A.M
. He was, he realized with a start, still fully dressed, down to his shoes. Tentatively, he lifted an arm, then his head; then he sat up.

Slowly, he got off the bed and started toward the kitchen. But before he’d taken five steps, the terror hit with tidal force. So physically traumatic an experience
always
leaves aftereffects—at the very least, wooziness and disorientation. But now there was nothing. Except for slight hunger pangs, he felt absolutely wonderful; better, in fact, than he’d felt in months. Like a finely conditioned athlete on a natural high.

This was as frightening as anything yet. He’d always taken his body for granted, but even it seemed beyond his control.

The thought, once it presented itself, was impossible to shake: Atlas!—and he’d meant it only as a warning.

T
he early hour wasn’t the only reason he didn’t tell Perez what he was going to do. Acutely aware his friend regarded him as delusional on the subject of the ACF, Logan preferred to not even imagine how he’d react to a snap predawn decision to take off for Washington, D.C.

Picking up his car at the lot on Eleventh Avenue where he had long-term parking, Logan headed into the Lincoln Tunnel just as dawn was breaking. Doing seventy-five most of the way, stopping just once for gas, he made it to downtown Washington in less than four and a half hours, pulling up before the FCC Building on M Street just after ten.

Too late. The sidewalks, which only moments before had been alive with government functionaries hurrying to work in the boxy, nondescript office buildings lining the broad avenue, now were nearly empty.

Logan wheeled around a corner and headed right, toward Pennsylvania Avenue and his alternative destination: the National Archives.

What he needed was a volume called
The Martin Allen Directory of European SS Arrivals, 1890–1940, Port of New York
. He’d learned the day before, ironically enough in the New York Public Library, that it was available only here.

“Are you looking for a particular voyage?” asked the officious young man who handed it to him.

“Actually, I’m looking for a specific name. I don’t know the date they sailed, or even the exact year.”

The young man gave a tight smile. “I hope you have a lot of time.”

Since the book provided just a record of departures and arrivals—the individual passenger lists being available only
on microfilm—Logan was reduced to playing probabilities. In all likelihood, German-Jewish refugees exiting Germany would have left via Hamburg, the country’s principal port. It was also probable—assuming the cause of their departure was the rise of Nazism—that they’d have left between January 1933, when Hitler was named German chancellor, and late 1938. And though there were several companies that had worked the route between northern Germany and New York, Logan decided to concentrate on by far the most prominent: the Hamburg-Amerika line.

Still, throughout almost the entire period, Hamburg-Amerika had three ships running out of Hamburg simultaneously—the
Potsdam
, the
Bremen
, and the
Lübeck
, each making approximately fifteen round trips annually. The sheer volume was staggering. Worse, when he requested the first microfilm reel bearing passenger rosters, he discovered that the lists, numbering as many as fifteen hundred names apiece, were handwritten—and not in alphabetical order.

It was the very definition of tedium, reading down those long columns of names, hour after hour; individuals and family groupings by the thousands, the
tens
of thousands, all but indistinguishable from one another. He’d chosen to work ship by ship, starting with the
Bremen
. More than once, aware that his attention had wavered—that his eye had seen but his brain not registered—Logan had to go back to the top of a list and begin again. He could not take the chance that he’d missed the single name he was after.

Falzheim
.

Working through the morning, he did not find it. The closest approximation, which he dutifully jotted down, was
Pfaltzstein, Ernst
.

By midafternoon, having moved on to the
Potsdam
, he was up to August 1934, when he made note of a second name that seemed close.
Forcheim, Leopold;
immediately followed by
Forcheim, Hilda
and
Forcheim, Greta
. A whole little Forcheim clan, he realized, and pressed on.

An hour later, dizzy with fatigue, he took a break and dialed the lab.

“You’re in Washington?” exclaimed Perez. “What the hell for?”

“Look, just do me a favor. Do you have that phone book handy?”

“Oh, Christ, man. You went down there for
that?
”

“I just want to try a couple of names on you. You got a Pfaltzstein? With a P?”

“What?”

He spelled it.

Logan heard the pages rustling. “No way. You know something, I oughta have you locked up.”

“How about Forcheim? With an F.”

He sighed. “Hey, yeah—I got one.”

“Where?”

“Up in my neighborhood, Washington Heights. 802 W. 190th St.”

Logan wrote it down. “Good. Thanks.”

“You gonna keep looking?”

“I think so. I’ll give you a call when I get home.”