The Placebo Effect (34 page)

Thinking himself alone in the synagogue, Decker went over his plan. He laid out his props and put Steve's computer, which he had loaded the night before, on a lectern on the west gallery. Then he pulled out his remote—and with a flourish hit the play button. Nothing. He pointed and clicked again. A profound nothing. He swore then calmed himself down and remembered Steve's instructions. He went through them—pressed—a profound, resolute, and uncompromising nothing.

He was tempted to throw the thing at the screen then he stopped himself and shook it—no rattle. He pried open the battery compartment—no fucking batteries! More than $7,500 to rent the damned screens and they wouldn't throw in damned batteries. He checked his watch. Enough time. He raced out into the night, passing so close to MacMillan's hiding figure that for a moment the Scotsman feared he'd been seen.

MacMillan checked to be sure that Decker had left the synagogue, then climbed to the monitor in the east gallery and reported to Henry-Clay.

“Give me the serial number of the thing.”

MacMillan did. Henry-Clay hung up and called his IT guy. Within a half an hour Henry-Clay had his computer set up and an all-purpose remote. He was ready to do battle.

The Super Store manager played hardball with Yslan about giving her any information without a warrant.

“What is it with you Midwesterners!”

“We don't like terrorists from the Middle East or from D.C.”

Yslan called Harrison, who after a colourful series of expletives about Midwesterners, put in a call.

Decker ran down yet another street trying to find a damned store that was open and finally found one attached to a gas station with an ancient-looking pump. For a moment Decker stopped and stared at the old thing—it had a crank on the side to bring up the gas from the reservoir. He turned toward the store. A greenish
light came from it. “Am I in a Hopper painting?” Decker said aloud. And as soon as his words misted into the cold air, a car pulled up to the pump and the service area returned to its multiuse modern self.

The sudden time shifting terrified Decker. He knew it was a warning of some kind of sea change in his world, but he had no time to consider what it could possibly be.

He entered the convenience store, quickly found the batteries, and brought them to the all-night clerk who was idly leafing through a copy of
Player
—no doubt looking for the best articles. Without bothering to look at Decker he scanned the batteries then pointed to the figure on the cash register. Decker was taken aback by the price but reached into his pocket for his wallet. No wallet. The other pocket—a twenty-dollar bill. He handed it over. The clerk bagged the batteries without taking his eyes from his magazine and returned a single ten-dollar bill to Decker. “Sorry. Got no change,” he said, clearly not the least bit sorry.

Decker took the single bill and stepped out into the cold night. Ideas were echoing in his head: a single U.S. ten-dollar bill, no wallet—at night. He looked around and he was not sure of the way back to the synagogue. Not sure where he was—with a single ten-dollar bill—suddenly the smell of the Huangpu River was to his left and the buildings all around him seemed to arch in. He was in the old city of Shanghai—and profoundly, utterly lost.

Mac opened the door and Henry-Clay entered the synagogue. Mac's men followed them. Henry-Clay looked around the building then assumed his place in the east gallery. He looked at the three hanging screens—and waited. He was good at that—as far as he was concerned this being forced to wait was just a negotiating tactic—one he'd used many times himself in the past so he took a seat in a pew and looked at what he thought of as “the rich Jew stuff.”

Decker staggered down a roadway that had no street sign. He
clutched his coat around him. The night was getting incredibly cold. At least he had his watch. He looked down—the slight green light told him that it was already 11:25—and he didn't know where the fuck he was.

Then he saw the river. The Huangpu? How the hell did the Huangpu River get here? Fear wrapped itself around him like a sodden blanket, then whispered to him, “This is too big for you. Way too big.” Decker felt himself nodding in agreement. He allowed himself to retreat to a cell without a door—a room with no way out. He pressed his back against a wall and found he could not move.

Mr. T had released Emerson with a stern warning to “keep your fucking nose out of our business,” but Emerson wasn't going to take his marching orders from some has-been steroid freak. And besides, he had a sneaking suspicion that all this was leading back to that weird place on Plum Street. It made an odd kind of sense to him that it'd go there—the kind of sense his
grandmère
understood, and that he was beginning to understand. This whole thing had something to do with the sacred—the other.

Decker pressed his back against the alley wall and tried to stop his rising panic. Then at the far end of the alley he saw a figure—a figure with something in its arms. A baby! Then the figure was approaching, its free arm outstretched to Decker.

The scream that came to Decker's throat never hit the air. The figure came closer and closer its arm still extended.

Then it entered the glow of the streetlight.

Not a baby—a bag of groceries.

“Mr. Roberts?”

How did this thing know his name—and why wasn't it speaking Mandarin?

“Mr. Roberts, it's Chuck E.”

Decker tried to retreat farther into the wall.

“Chuck E. The Shabbos goy? Everyone's waiting for you.”

Then, over the Shabbos goy's shoulder he saw them.

DECKER ENTERED THE SYNAGOGUE AND STOOD BENEATH
the east gallery—where Henry-Clay was now waiting. Decker breathed deeply then took in the mise-en-scène. His lectern and computer awaited him on the west gallery. The three screens gave off their “I'm waiting” grey glow.

He reached into his pocket and took out his freshly batteried remote and pressed two keys. All three screens immediately came to life with the CBC logo he had downloaded from the Net, which was followed by the hackneyed CBC News theme song, then a title: “34.4 Percent of Calatrex Pills Are Fakes.” A dissolve to Steve sitting at his kitchen table looking very newscasterly as he began: “Stunning new tests prove that thirty-four point four percent, more than one out of every three Calatrex tablets, are nothing more than sugar pills. At forty dollars apiece, that means that for a bottle of ten pills at least three and probably four are no more than white-painted candy and cost the consumer on average one hundred and forty dollars for nothing.”

The newscast continued, and Decker crossed the darkness of the sanctuary floor and mounted the steps to the west gallery. Once he was at the lectern there, he clicked on a light and started up his computer.

Across the way he saw six men, one sitting on his own, who he assumed was Henry-Clay Yolles. He had a shopping bag of some sort at his side. The others were standing. All were backlit by the huge screen.

Decker hit the pause button—Steve's glorious smile filled all
three screens. Decker leaned into the mic on his lectern and said, “This goes to air shortly unless we can come to some sort of agreement.”

“About what, Mr. Roberts?”

Henry-Clay's voice surprised Decker. It was light—airy. Not whispered, but slightly sibilant.

“You burned down my fucking house.”

“Did I?”

“Deny it?”

“I do deny it.”

Out-of-sync spirals whizzed through Decker's head, then straightened into three parallel lines. For a moment Decker thought he had it all wrong. Henry-Clay's denial was true. Then he relaxed—wrong question elicits wrong answer. “Did you order the burning of my house?”

“No.”

Random lines, no resolving into shapes—a nontruth. A damned lie. Then he felt the cold surround him and something metallic in his right hand. He had to use all his considerable willpower not to fall.

Henry-Clay took the universal remote from his pocket and aimed it at the screens. All three blinked out. “You're not showing that piece of rubbish, or I'll have so many lawyers up your ass that you'll think you're a law firm.”

Straight lines. True. “Doesn't matter to me. The last thing you want is for this to go public, so bring on the lawyers.”

A moment of silence from Henry-Clay. Then he said, “What do you want?”

“I want you to back off.”

“Meaning what exactly?”

“Pay for my house.”

“I had nothing to do with your house burning down.”

Random lines—a nontruth.

“And have my credit cards reinstated.”

“I had nothing to do with you and your credit cards.”

Straight line! What?

“And get the bank to reissue my loan.”

“What bank loan? I don't know anything about a bank loan.”

Yet more straight lines.

“And you had nothing to do with getting my studio condemned?”

“Not a damned thing.”

A perfect cube—another truth. Decker faltered for a moment then thought,
One of these things is not like the others; one of these things just doesn't belong.
Then he thought,
No, dammit—three of these things are not like the other. Cancelling credit cards, calling loans, having a building condemned—legal things. Charendoff things. But arson—that's a Henry-Clay Yolles thing.
He smiled—one mystery solved.

“Are you really buying the Treloar Building?”

Decker hit F7 on his computer and a copy of the mock deed came up on the screens.

Henry-Clay turned to look at it carefully. Then he laughed. “You've been defeated by your own technology, Mr. Roberts. I doubt that I would have seen the imperfections in this fake if you'd put it on a table in front of me—but blown up to twice the size of God, in high-definition with a gazillion pixels, this is clearly a fake.”

“True—actually, just a way to get you to see this.” He pressed F8 on his computer and the newscast continued with a series of shots of the demonstration by African Americans outside Yolles Pharmaceuticals. “I thought you'd like that part—place and time and an ethnic group always helps a story have legs. This could be on every evening newscast by this time tomorrow. CNN has expressed real interest. FOX is hesitating—but they haven't said no.”

Decker looked at the gallery across the way—unless he was mistaken, there were two fewer men there now than before. He quickly moved to the access door to his gallery, and closed and locked it. He knew the old thing wouldn't hold for long, but it could give him a moment or two that could be crucial.

“So what do you say, Mr. Yolles—if I press shift F9 this thing wings its way to every major broadcaster in the country.”

“They'll know it's a fake.”

“Not after it appears on the Canadian Broadcasting Company—and there's already a copy of it up there.”

“You have no proof of anything.”

“Really.” Decker hit F1 and the cover page of Mike's ratio document came up on the screen. Then he hit F2 and Henry-Clay's own University of Chicago MS thesis about placebo ratios came up. “From your silence I assume you see my evidence is compelling. Answer me this, Mr. Yolles. Why attack me?”

“Stupid question, Mr. Roberts. Because you know when something's the truth. A placebo by its nature is a lie, and you could expose Calatrex.”

“I still might do that.”

“I doubt it.”

What did that mean? “You set up the interviews for me in Orlando, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland, didn't you?”

“Yep.”

“To audition me?”

“I was just doing my due diligence. I needed to see if you lived up to your billing before bringing you onto the team.”

“I'm not on your team. I'm not on any fucking team!”

“Sure, have it that way if you like. But as strange as it may sound coming from someone like me, we're all on some team.”

Dylan's lyrics from “Gotta Serve Somebody” flipped into Decker's head.

“And you passed your ‘audition'—got the role—and then Ratio-Man went and told you our little secret up there in the Juncture.”

“The Junction.”

“Who fuckin' cares! 'Cause now we're here.” He aimed his universal remote at the screen and pressed a button. The screens went black. “Now it's time for my case. You ready, Mr. Roberts?”

Decker nodded—or at least he thought he nodded.

“Look at the screen, Mr. Roberts.” He pressed a button and the
agreement to hand over control of all BCG production to Yolles Pharmaceuticals in North America came up. “Let me summarize this little doc for you, Mr. Roberts. BCG is the accepted and only treatment for bladder cancer. It's a money loser so no one really wants to be saddled with producing the stuff. But after a bit of investigation I decided it was a good idea.
Comprendez?
”

Decker nodded.

“Speak up, Mr. Roberts—we don't want to misunderstand each other at this crucial ‘juncture.' Do we?”

“No, we don't want to misunderstand each other—and yes, I understand what that document entitles Yolles Pharmaceuticals to do.”

“Good. 'Cause here's another somewhat more personal document.” He hit a button on his PowerPoint presentation and Seth's medical records that MacMillan's man had stolen from the Victoria hospital came up. “Note the name on the top, Mr. Roberts.”

Decker stared at it, unable to speak.

Henry-Clay scrolled down through the document to
DIAGNOSIS: BLADDER CANCER
—then to
TREATMENT: BCG
.

Henry-Clay said, “And just in case you think this is fake shit…”

“Fake shit… what?”

“Wait for it, Mr. Roberts.” Henry-Clay pressed the send button and a second later an order was received, and out on Vancouver Island a gun was held to Seth's head, and the phone in Decker's pocket rang.