Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a little gray wisp emerge from the dark between the tanks. It walked with a quick, shuffling step along the platform. I craned my neck. At first I thought it was an old man, head small and wrinkled, eyes large, frame shrunken, walking along the upper ramp, skirting the aquariums. But something about the way the wisp moved, a sway of the shoulders with each step, made me think again about its sex.
Rob watched with feverish interest.
“There she is,” Stuart said.
“That’s the caretaker?” I asked.
Stuart nodded. His Adam’s apple bobbed. He did not look happy to see her.
The caretaker wore a calf-length black shift and a cloth cap like the ones they give newborns. The kids stood out of the way as the specter passed. She nodded to all and patted a slender boy of sixteen or seventeen on the head, folding her lips into a ghost of affection.
She glided down a flight of steel steps in a blur of tiny feet.
Stuart and Norton stepped back as she passed, as if they might catch something that would steal away their souls. She ignored them.
The caretaker walked around Rob and me, inspecting us with a patient, gray gaze, her head tilting left, then right. She smelled like wine left in a glass after a party.
“Rob Cousins,” she said in a youthful tenor voice that could have been either male or female. She reached out and pulled Rob’s hand close to her eyes. “You’ve made some mistakes, I see.”
Despite his resistance, she thrust out the hand for our inspection. Between the tendons on the back, the skin had folded and puckered into tight little furrows. I had noticed the marks before and thought they might be scars from an operation.
“Gross mistakes,” the caretaker said.
“What about you?” Rob said, his voice gravelly.
The caretaker held up her own hand: the same puckers, though smoothed over by the years. “How old do you think I am?” she asked Rob.
Rob snatched back his hand. “You’re suffering from progeria,” he said. “Premature aging. You’re forty, tops.”
The expression on her face hardened. “No reason to be petty.” She was not used to being judged. “Once I was the future, Dr. Cousins.”
She walked back toward the ramp, shoulders undulating slowly, wrists hanging. When we held back, she turned and blinked like a thin old monkey at Stuart and Norton. They urged us to follow with a couple of shoves. To Stuart, it was just part of the day. Norton enjoyed shoving.
The agents in wrinkled suits stayed by the door, foreheads damp. The kids vanished into the shadows.
For some time now I had been looking for a way to start a mad minute, to provoke some hasty action from our captors—without getting killed ourselves. Nothing. They were tight and observant.
The caretaker walked ahead of us down a dark, tomb-quiet hallway. The polished floor shone in the milky fluorescence of a far-off ceiling fixture. Rob caught up with our guide. “You said I did something wrong. How wrong? How do you know?”
She looked up. “Your chemistry runs like a spinning top first this way, then that. You cut too many channels between the Little Mothers. The puckers show me you will have the disease in a few months, perhaps sooner. Yes, you could live a long time. Maybe centuries. But you will spend years in rabid madness.”
Rob looked like a dog about to throw up. He hung back, and Norton gave him an encouraging tap on the ankle with the tip of his hard black shoe.
“We’re going to be killed,” Rob told me, as if this was news.
I looked back at Stuart and Norton. “You’re going to let this happen?”
Stuart shrugged.
I just wanted to see who was paying more attention. I knew how these guys thought, the exercises they went through at the end of a hard day to put away in drawers the things they had done and seen. Maybe this was all I deserved. Christ, I had gotten slow the last few years.
All the corners, the edges between walls and floor, walls and ceiling, were covered over with curved runnels of ceramic. The linoleum was not linoleum, I realized, as we walked a few steps, but long sheets of blue tile sealed with a vitreous sheen. The walls were also tile, fitted and treated to eliminate seams.
Not a breath of air in the hall. Age showed here and there in the star pattern of an impact fracture or cracks from building settling. Some of them had been repaired—glazed over with another vitreous layer.
The caretaker touched the wall with a finger. “Once a day, they used to go through the corridors outside the labs with steam hoses and sterilize, in the evenings. The whole building smelled like a Chinese laundry. It was a lovely smell.” She turned. “You keep looking at me, Mr. Bridger. You have obvious questions. I am Maxim’s wife.”
“Maxim Golokhov?” Rob asked.
“Yes,” the caretaker said, so softly we could barely hear. She turned to the left and Norton pushed us again.
“We’re going to ask you some questions,” he said.
I tried to match this wrinkled stick with the woman in the video, lean but handsome, smiling. I couldn’t.
Stuart took a position by the turn in the corridor and crossed his arms. One last pleading look didn’t faze him.
Norton pointed to an open doorway. Inside a small office was a bare wooden desk and an old, scarred filing cabinet with labels in Cyrillic. Photos lined the walls. Norton pushed two chairs up to the desk. Rob and I sat. The caretaker stood by the wall of photos. I swept my eyes over the ranks of small black frames and their black-and-white contents. I recognized none of the people in the photos on sight, except for one—in the lower left-hand corner, Joseph Stalin, standing beside another, younger man, both in military dress, both smiling. Stalin looked to be in his sixties. A war photo.
“Let’s get going,” Norton said. “We don’t want to be here too long.”
The caretaker gave him a pinched look. “Dr. Cousins,” she said, “your research is interesting, what you allowed to be published.”
Norton kept his eye on us with as much intellectual engagement as a guard dog.
“My question for you is, will you stop your research?”
Rob looked up. “Would that do me any good? I’m a dead man already.”
