The Placebo Effect (14 page)

Decker sat over that last thought. Across the way a truck was backing up to a loading dock. Decker wondered what was being shipped at this hour of the night. Then he heard a loud knocking on the studio door.

It was clearly not a student wanting to deliver an application for class. This was a demand to open. Then came a clearer demand; “Mr. Roberts, open the door, police.”

Decker felt the beard on his face. The cell phone was on the couch. He pocketed it and went to the door. He didn't know exactly why the police would be at his studio, but he assumed it was about the fire. After all, he had made no effort to hide his identity as the owner of the house in the Junction and as the artistic director of the Professional Actors Lab. His secret identity was reserved for his truth-telling business.

He opened the door. Garreth presented his ID and Decker stepped aside to let him into the studio.

“Nice,” Garreth said.

“It's open—way better than teaching in a church basement.”

Garreth made a sound that could have been affirmative or negative—it was hard to tell which.

“Can I help you, Officer? I assume this is about my house.”

“Why would you assume that?”

Decker did his best not to roll his eyes. “My house burned down yesterday.”

“And where were you before that happened?”

“I've already answered…”

“Indulge me.”

“In the States.”

“Doing what?”

“Business.”

“Can you prove that?”

“Why should I have to prove anything?”

“You have your ticket handy?”

Decker stepped back. “Should I get a lawyer?”

“Why would you need a lawyer?”

“Because it sounds like you're accusing me of something.”

“Is there something I should accuse you of, Mr. Roberts?”

Decker let out a long breath. “No! My fucking house burned down. If I'm anything I'm a victim here.”

“Of what? A victim of what?”

“Of bad wiring or I don't know what—whatever burns down houses. I'm a victim of that.”

“Of arson.”

“What?”

“Arson. Your house was torched, Mr. Roberts.”

“What?”

“Torched. This wasn't an electrical fire. Or a gas leak that found a spark. It wasn't a carbonated beverage shorting out a wall socket.”

“That can cause a fire?”

“In an old house with copper wiring, yes.”

“It wasn't any of that, so what was it?”

“Incendiary devices set inside your front and back doorways, Mr. Roberts.”

Decker took a few steps back into his studio. Incendiary devices! Fuck—bombs!

“How did you manage to get out, Mr. Roberts?”

“I wrapped myself in wet towels and ran down the stairs, then out through the steam tunnel exit in the basement.”

Garreth looked at him.

“What?”

“You didn't increase the value on your insurance lately, did you? Remember, we can check.”

“No.” Then it dawned on Decker what this man thought. “You've been watching too many movies, Officer. No one in their right mind would set fire to their house while they're still in it. It's like that crap in novels where the least likely person is the one who did it.” Decker put on a bit of a swagger and said, “Hey, it's got to be the blind, Alzheimer quadriplegic whose wife beats him on a daily basis—hey, it's got to be him. Wake up, Officer. I almost burned to death in my own house.”

Garreth ignored Decker's rant. “Have you got a passport, Mr. Roberts?”

“Yes, but…”

“Is it here with you? Because it's not in your safety-deposit box.”

“How did you…?”

“Banks like police officers. Now where is your passport?”

“It was in my house.”

“Really? Did you use it to cross into the United States? Officer Randall at the scene of the crime reported that you said you'd just returned from the States—as you reiterated to me just now. And as you are no doubt aware, our American neighbours don't allow anyone into their fine country without a passport—something about terrorists, I believe.”

“Okay. That's enough. I don't have to answer any of these stupid questions. Now get out of my face.”

“Mr. Roberts…”

“Am I under arrest?”

“No but…”

“Then I don't think you have any right in my place of work, which is now my home as well. And yes, to save you the trouble,
Stafford Street is zoned for work/living spaces. This isn't the nineteen-sixties; we have rights now.”

“Indeed we do.”

“Get out.”

“Here's my card.” He almost added “Don't think of leaving town,” then stopped himself and asked instead, “Have we met before?”

“No.”

“Have you ever been in trouble with the law, Mr. Roberts?”

Decker closed the door in Garreth's face then shouted, “No!”

Decker did his best to wash in the bathroom sink, then unfolded the couch and stretched out. He heard the hum of the city all around him. He placed the cell phone beside him in case Seth called in the night—much of Western Canada was three hours behind Toronto time. His last thought before falling asleep was to charge the phone in the morning.

HENRY-CLAY WATCHED MR. MACMILLAN'S VIDEO OF DECKER'S
house collapse then glanced at the small newspaper photo on page twenty-two of the very dead Ratio-Man. He nodded and tossed the paper aside.

Henry-Clay smiled. He knew that he was never special. He had no secret talent, he wasn't blessed with particularly good looks or a powerful physique, he wasn't even, if truth be known, all that bright—he just fucking worked harder than anyone else around him. He thought of films like
Wall Street
and
Boiler Room
as instructional videos.

He hated comic book heroes. He thought it unfair that superheroes won because they had superpowers. The bad guys just used their brains and worked hard—like him. They, as far as he could see, were emblematic of the American work ethic. They were rightly American heroes making something from nothing using only their brains and willpower. The superheroes might have represented the values of Jupiter or Neptune or something but certainly not of this earthly plane.

Henry-Clay had spent his undergraduate years at all-fun Tulane in pre-Katrina New Orleans, where he made the first of his great business decisions and quite a name for himself on campus—in his mind the daily double. He kept book for the Green Wave's basketball team. As a natural adjunct to his bookmaking he also arranged for point shaving in the games. As a short guy it was his only access to the basketball court. He also thought of it as one of the few things at Tulane that the black and white students
did together—fix basketball games, that is. When—after Tulane inexplicably blew a ten-point lead in the final minute and a half of a game against Ole Miss—it became obvious to anyone with eyes that something was up, Henry-Clay exiled himself to Europe, where he completed his degree and latched on to an idea he knew would eventually have to take hold in America—the morning-after pill.

Then he spotted an obvious business opportunity in the good ol' religious U.S. of A. So upon his return to this side of the pond he set up the first of what would quickly become twenty-seven abortion clinics in the Midwest.

The returns were good, and he was about to double his empire when some nut shot one of his doctors. Then another, and Henry-Clay decided to return to a safer line of work—pharmaceuticals. A pill for every problem—and new problems to unearth for which pills would be needed.

He knew he'd have to get a graduate degree to bust into the pill racket, but he had no real aptitude for math or sciences. He returned to his alma mater and bulled his way through math and physics, but chemistry actually required some finesse—which Henry-Clay knew he lacked. But he kept at it and eventually at age thirty-two he earned an MS in chemistry from the University of Chicago, although writing and publishing his thesis almost killed him. But his real work at that fine institution of higher learning was recruiting. All around him were some of the brightest young scientists in the world, and few if any had twenty dollars to their name or any business savvy—of which he had an abundance.

Two failed marriages and several millions of dollars over the dam and with the help of the Ratio-Man he found himself sitting on a gold mine. Until Ratio-Man found his way to the Junction and told Decker about the drug ratio—that left him no choice but to have both dealt with.

No choice. Fuckin' no choice.

It made him feel helpless—like a damned kid. Infantilized.

That's what the idiot shrink he saw exactly one time called him.

“You've been infantilized, Mr. Yolles,” he'd said.

“Explain that to me, Doc.”

“It's one of the few conditions that are passed down from one generation to the next.”

“What are you talking about? Down syndrome and dozens of other dysfunctions are passed from one generation to the next.”

“Yes, but those are genetic.”

“And this infantilizing is passed down from one generation to the next how, if not by genetics?”

“By behaviour. It's passed down by behaviour.”

“What? My parents taught me to be this infantilized person?”

“No doubt without meaning to, but, yes, they taught you. What did your father do? Was he in business?”

“No. He didn't do much of anything to the best of my knowledge. He got up each morning and went for a swim in the university pool, but I don't ever recall him working.”

“And he's dead now?”

“A long time back.”

“How did he die?”

“Just sort of—of old age.”

“How old was he when he died of old age?”

“Not that old.”

“How old, Mr. Yolles?”

“In his forties.”

“Too young to die of old age, wouldn't you say?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get that.”

“Do you remember much of him?”

Henry-Clay looked away.

The shrink tried another tack. “Did he ever share his memories of his youth?”

“Yeah. As a young kid he remembered going to New York and catching the boat to Europe for the opera season. He talked about that a lot, and opera—he loved opera.”

“And what did his father do?”

“He was a builder. Owned the biggest building in this city.”

“Owned—as in past tense?”

“Yeah, he lost it.”

“How did he do that?”

“The market crash in twenty-nine—you may recall the stock market had a wee bit of a problem that year.”

“Yes, but most people didn't lose their buildings in the crash.”

Henry-Clay took a deep breath. “My grandfather was one of five brothers. They all invested together. When the market crashed in twenty-nine my grandfather and his youngest brother convinced the other three brothers that now was the time to get seriously into the market and make a killing. They all mortgaged everything they owned—their homes and their buildings—and put it all into the market. They lost it—everything. Everything.” Henry-Clay stood up suddenly and walked to the window of the psychiatrist's office. “See that building across the Ohio River?”

The psychiatrist nodded. “The Treloar Building?”

“Didn't used to be called that when my grandfather and his brothers owned it. The day after they lost everything my grandfather held hands with his youngest brother and they jumped off that building. Apparently that was the family agreement. Their insurance money was split evenly between the five families, but—and here's an interesting but—the families of the brothers who didn't jump never talked to the families of the two brothers who did. Never talked to my father. I never even met my cousins except in passing, and even then the tension was so great we had nothing to say to one another.”

“So you see?”

“Their suicide infantilized my father, who then infantilized me? Is that what you're saying?” Henry-Clay turned and picked up his coat. “Thanks for the advice, Doc, but by the by—I'm the richest of all the progeny of those five morons and I could buy that building back if I wanted to, and the rest of the buildings on that street.”

“Then why don't you?”

“Because I've been infantilized—don't ya know?”

Henry-Clay banished the memory then turned to his computer—time to find a new freak. Using the algorithm that Ratio-Man had given Nasty Natasha and yesterday's date he entered his web master codes for the synaesthetes website and got a shock. Decker Roberts was lurking in the chat room.

LEAVENWORTH FEDERAL PENITENTIARY LOOKS LIKE A TURN
-of-the-century high school gone crazy on steroids. Its front capitals and portals are formal and could have been those of a post office in a large city, but they weren't—they were the gates to a world of pain and suffering.

Yslan had only been in a federal penitentiary once before, and had promised herself that she wouldn't return, but here she was at Harrison's request—showing her letter of introduction and her ID to a fully armed guard who sat behind a bulletproof plexiglass screen.

The guard shoved a metal tray through the hole in the glass and Yslan deposited her wallet, ID, cell phone, her dad's ring and her watch. Then she emptied her pockets of change and added those to the rest. She walked through a metal detector and the thing buzzed. She held up her arms and the guard took his time establishing that her metal belt buckle was the culprit.

Forty-five minutes later she was sitting in an interview room that smelled vaguely of fear and vomit covered by antibacterial soap, waiting for Martin Armistaad, a convicted fraudster and mathematical genius who had predicted too many market highs and lows for it to be an accident.