Lissa sneezed. “How did you know it was this one?” she asked as she took a Kleenex from her purse.
I explained. “Much too obvious,” I concluded under my breath.
“Obvious to whom?”
Someone spoke at the end of the hall. We both leaped into the office. I closed the door and fumbled for the light switch. Fluorescents flickered to stark white brilliance over the small lobby and down the hall.
Lissa let out her breath and laughed. “We’re acting like burglars,” she whispered.
“Not as long as the rent’s paid up,” I said.
“It’s been a month and a half,” Lissa said.
We were just talking to break the quiet. What we saw did not make much sense. Cardboard file boxes lined the wall behind the door. Two had toppled from a corner stack. We stepped over a slide of old issues of Friday, Colliers, Time, and Life magazines.
I slid open a balky closet door and found heaps of newspapers, a box full of clippings, another box packed with offprints from Web sites.
“What was he doing?” Lissa asked.
“Research,” I guessed. I picked up a magazine. Two pages had had clippings removed. Nearly all the magazines in the stacks were from the late 1940s and early ’50s. A few dated back to the ’30s.
The carpet—what we could see beneath the boxes—was worn and gray.
“What is that smell?” Lissa asked, and tried to hold in another sneeze. It backed up on her, and she snorked delicately into the Kleenex.
“Old newspapers,” I guessed.
“Smells like stale beer.”
We looked into the second room, a small office space about ten feet on each side, and found a folding cot covered by a single wool blanket. Around the cot, books and newspapers filled cheap pine-and-cinder-block shelves, overflowed boxes, or tumbled out of another small closet. The books were paperbacks, mostly, narratives and histories of World Wars I and II, the Russian Revolution. I recognized a few Rob and I had read as kids.
I spotted three hardcover books by Rudy Banning and pulled them carefully from the middle of a stack. Between Two Devils, a history of the Hitler/Stalin alliance, was labeled NY TIMES BEST-SELLER FOR FIVE WEEKS. It had been published in 1985. The second, We Knew Nothing, compared German civilian complicity in the Holocaust with Russian civilian complicity in the expulsion of Jews to Siberia in the 1950s. Published in 1992, it was not labeled as a best-seller. Each of these was heavily underlined and annotated, with lavender, yellow, and pink highlighting spread across many pages.
The third, slender and outsized—Blondi, Dog of Destiny—had been published in 1997 by the White Truth Press in Ojai, California. On the title page, in bold fountain-pen strokes, it was signed, “To Rob and any future children—a legacy of fact, sworn to by Rudolph B.”
I passed Blondi to Lissa, who studied the simple illustrations with a wrinkled brow. “Hitler had a dog?” she asked.
“I guess so.”
I placed the valise, never out of my sight, on the floor and piled Banning’s two other books on top, then dug through the closet. A small safe, bolted to the floor, stood open beside accumulations of the San Jose Mercury News.
My brother had never been a pack rat. He had always traveled light, just like me. This clutter was totally unlike him and pointed to either a hasty and unfinished project or a true change in personality.
I stooped and looked into the safe. Empty.
Through the thin walls, I heard the mechanical chuckle of a small compressor turning on—a refrigerator, I guessed. The sound came from the third room, at the end of the hall.
That room was the largest, about twenty feet long and twelve wide. A small conference table in the center supported at one end a small, cubic white refrigerator. A medical-quality microscope occupied a cleared space at the opposite end. Bottles of chemicals and boxes of lab supplies shared the middle with a loaf of bread and some cheese, a wilted head of lettuce, an open jar of dried yellow mayonnaise, and a package of Oscar Mayer lunch meat. The cheese, bread, and lunch meat had long since been covered by a lush growth of mold.
A pan perched on a small cookstove on the floor held a cracked sheen of agar.
A six-foot freezer chest thrust out into the room from the right wall. White, spotless but for a thin layer of dust, and conspicuously padlocked, the freezer hummed efficiently to itself. I glanced quickly at two big maps pinned on a corkboard above: Russia and North America.
“Bachelor apartment,” Lissa said blandly. She opened the refrigerator and took out a petri dish. “Mosquitoes,” she said, holding it up. She picked out others. “Flower petals, I think. More lettuce. Apple slices. Lots of mold.” She held up a rack of test tubes filled with milky fluid.
“Bacterial samples,” I said.
She paused, lifted a small plastic tray of six more dishes, and said, “Meat. I think.” She replaced the tray and carefully wiped her fingers on her dress.
I stood before the freezer chest and looked more closely at the two maps. Red and blue pushpins marked locations on both. I leaned forward. In Siberia, a red pushpin had been stabbed into the northern end of Lake Baikal. Red pins also marked parts of Southern California, Utah—the Great Salt Lake—and Yellowstone. Three blue pins punched a line off the coasts of Oregon and Washington. A red pin almost obscured the southern end of San Francisco Bay. That could be the salt lagoons Lissa had told me about. A blue pin rose out of New York City. The other pins could mark bacterial concentrations of interest—but New York City?
I rested my hand on the freezer, looked down, and tugged at the padlock on the steel latch.
“Should we?” Lissa asked.
“Of course,” I said. If anyone had a right, I thought, it was I.
Lissa stood behind me, curious despite herself. I used the shiny steel key. The padlock snicked and fell open. I lifted the lid. A small cloud of vapor rose from the interior and quickly settled.
Lissa gave a shrill yelp and retreated.
I have seen dead human bodies before, in medical supply houses, on dissecting tables. I know what they look like. But I never get over the shock of seeing another. For me, a dead body means defeat. I bent over to look more closely. I had no doubt there was a reason for this particular body to be there, in my brother’s rented office, frozen, still wearing black socks and a rucked-up T-shirt and blue bikini briefs. There was also certain to be an explanation for why it had been autopsied. The top of the head had been sliced through and the skullcap removed, leaving most of the brain and peeled-back scalp to rest on a square of thick black-plastic sheeting. The torso had been opened in a single neat slice front to back, from the upper abdomen to the kidneys.
But this was no supply-house cadaver. Its flesh was pale blue and mottled green. I doubted that I would find lividity, blood pooled in the lower tissues, if I turned it over. It had probably been frozen after being dead less than a few hours.
I closed the lid and stepped back, bumping against the crowded central table. Took a deep breath to keep my stomach steady.
“We have to leave,” Lissa insisted.
